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Games Academy Spring 2020 – Steel Castle

Hi everyone! We’re from team Left & Right and our game is called Steel Castle.

Steel Castle is a puzzle-platformer adventure game that’s heavily inspired by Playdead’s titles LIMBO and INSIDE. As a player you control a vulnerable human protagonist, solve some puzzles and avoid death. We can’t emphasize the word avoid enough – if you seek conflict, you will die.

Features

  • Controller & Keyboard/Mouse support
  • An atmospheric experience with simple controls
  • A single-player game in a hostile environment

Download Steel Castle from itch.io!

Development

We had kind of a rough start and it felt that the development was running on quicksand and going nowhere. One of the biggest issues was losing two programmers early on and having to make do with 3 artists and 1 programmer.

Our issues became even more evident in mid-March when our progress (or lack thereof) was pointed out in a meeting with one of our teachers. Not to mention the state of the world right now that started to take effect in Finland as well during that time.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom, however. One of our big advantages was that we managed to keep our scope small from the very beginning and we were able to add more and more things, building on top of what had already been built instead of leaving a bunch of stuff in the cutting room floor. Granted, some ropes and more threats to the player would have been awesome but hey, you can’t have everything, right?

The biggest reason for our Steel Castle’s success is definitely the fact that one of our artists took the reins in scripting more and more functionality and things to interact with in the game. Importing DOTween was a genius move too that really gave us more time to think and implement new environments to the game instead of rubbing mechanics over and over again. Furthermore they’re responsible for our main character and most of the audio as well a whole host of other stuff that would drag this blog on forever, so talk about a multitasker!

In the end, Steel Castle was a huge learning experience for the whole team and we’re quite happy how the game turned out despite some growing pains.

Team

  • Tero Salmela: Art, Audio & programming
  • Kasimir Haapala: Art & SFX
  • Aino Kauranen: Art
  • Rudi Rutanen: Programming & PM
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Game Academy Autumn 2017: Robobox

ROBOBOX
by Team AF

Programmers: Max Louhio, Valtteri Ojanen & Lauri Kosonen
Graphics and music: Henrietta Kontio

About the game

Robobox is a 2D puzzle-platformer game where you play as a robot that commands box-shaped minions. The boxes are used to build structures, such as towers and bridges, to solve puzzles and get the player through each level. The levels are hand-built, compact and feature challenges of varying difficulty.

The player’s controls are simple movement and jumping, while the main focus of the game is in moving the boxes. The boxes can be attached to each other’s sides in any possible way and placed on buttons to activate doors.

Design process

The design process started with a card game. We had a pack of cards each containing one game mechanic and picked five random cards from the pack. After that we thought of a game concept that would contain all of the chosen game mechanics and fit into the three-month time frame. One of the ideas was a platformer in which the player creates new platforms using living boxes, which we decided to start working on.

In the beginning the game was focused more on the platformer part. We thought about adding more features, like combat, but quickly came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t fit the rest of the gameplay and scrapped it. Other features that were considered were lasers and reflective surfaces for more puzzle variety, wall magnets for more box placement options and a hub level. Eventually all of those features got dropped because ultimately we wanted the game to be simple and focus on solving puzzles with the boxes.

The levels were first going to be longer and the player would find more boxes on the way and sometimes abandon them to make progress. However, being forced to leave the boxes behind and to go back to pick them up again caused mixed reactions during our playtests. As a result, the levels were scaled down and the player was given the ability to teleport all boxes to their own location at any moment.

Playable versions are available here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B8qUyFDpU2FaZ2ZFUjJwM1U1UDA?usp=sharing


– Team AF