💎 Pitch
In a broken family, a brother and sister find shelter in a book for children to flee from the turmoil of their parents. Explore with them a story shaped by their imagination and fantasies. Will they be able to escape the harsh reality or will they be caught back in it ?
🌟 Introduction
Twice Upon a Time is a chill and cooperative two-player narrative platformer game bringing you back to a nostalgic world filled with all kinds of sweets and a gripping story.
During 3 months of work for a big school project we had to make a Couch Game type game, we decided to make one around a nice sibling story and competition.
Merging platforming, narrative, competition, taunt and fun into the same game.
Since playing books were a big part of my childhood, I really wanted the game to create a nostalgia for the players like me. I wanted the dialogues, funny or taunting quotes of the siblings to be authentic and realistic, making a kind of attachement for them through their story.
👾 Gameplay
Twice Upon A Time is a platformer 2D, so the gameplay is pretty simple, it's all about jumping, pushing, pulling and grabbing things !
Since it was supposed to be a vertical slice, we wanted to create multiple worlds with different themes and universes to play with, for the one and one only present in the slice we decided to go for a "Sweets & Candy" themed world.
Since it's a duo game, two players will have some asymetric gameplay from times to times, mixing cooperation and competition sometimes for a little bit of spice, taunt and sibling fights.
Gameplay Video
👨💻 What I've realized on the project
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Conceiving the obstacles
It was a really fun task, since we were in a "Sweet & Candy" world we wanted to use candies and sweet food as obstacles, so we made a nice list with all the candies we used to eat when we were younger.
Once the list of candy was done, we tried creating 2-3 ideas PER candy to explore a multitude of different exemple of how to use them in a platformer. (Ex: The Marshmallow being a bouncer or trampoline, the CandyCane could be some hooks or levers, etc..)
Brother & Sister
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Level Design
My 2nd task on the project was all about Level Design, with my 3 mates we were slowly creating some little compounds with single or double ingredients maximum.
That idea was to make sure we could see the full potential of what we could do with every single one of them, making a multitude of little puzzles and platformers just to be able later to combine them.
My task was to select the puzzles with the best potential (knowing that we could only set a certain amount of them).
So basicly drawing on the whiteboard or paper some sketchs or 1st try of the levels we wanted to show in the game, placing some sections for dialogues, others for competitives & cooperation gameplay.
📌 Lessons Learned
- We had an enormous amount of problems during the production, between issues when deciding for the Art Direction, choosing which mechanics to keep or to cut, being late on Level Design and Art, the project was really harsh to work on.
- All thoses problems helped me learn a lot about how a great organisation is the key for a great project (at least for the management part), how communicating between each corps help a lot, to ensure having the same vision of things and not having to erase, restart or repeat things.
- Being Lead Game Designer on the project made me learn how to proprely make the different cores of the group communicate, transmitting informations left and right, organising little meetings when high decision were taken to ensure the approval or understandement of everyone. It was really an amazing project to make.
⚡ Quick infos
Project made during 3 months as a Couch Game section of our school cursus.
The team :
Designers : Michael Bao, Rayan Kayne, Noé Henriot and myself
Artists : Flora Denis, Marion Puigcerver and Aurore Martin
Programmers : Victor Lacombe, Leo LeLann and Santino Romero
Sound Designers : Yassine Boudlal and Alexandre Cardot
Producers : Tom Crochet and Thomas Boeglin
Yes! It's playable on Itch.io!
