IDEA
All the team members agreed on making a vampire-themed game that was originally planned to be more Castlevania-like, but what in the progress got less and less Castlevania-like and more US-like.
We thought the main character would be a huge Dracula-fan trying to get an autograph from his biggest hero, having to overcome a wide variety of obstacles to be able to reach him. (Thus the name Fanpyr)
The basic idea is to get through Dracula’s castle using a bomb and a rope arrow to create platforms to get over obstacles and to get rid of nasty enemies.
Core mechanics of the game are walking, jumping, throwing bombs and using the rope arrow.
In the original idea, Dracula was supposed to be the end boss, but got scrapped due to lack of time. Instead, we created four castle-themed levels to get through by.
There’s only two types of enemies, spiders that descend from the ceiling, and some angrily scurrying rats. There were originally supposed to be more enemies such as wolves, skeletons and bats, but they got scrapped.
There were also supposed to be different themed levels like forest, sewer and dungeon, but as for now, all the levels are castle-themed.
DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS
We got lots and lots of ideas that we all liked and seriously wanted to put in the game.
We, however, realized pretty early on that we were maybe a bit too ambitious with all the ideas we had and it would take too much of a time to try to implement all of them in our game.
We ended up facing some major motivation issues and thus sadly got a bit behind other teams.
Many of the ideas had to be scrapped or downsized.
Artists split the work and made some early concept art of the main character and some of the enemies.
Not all the enemies ended up in the game, due to lack of time.
The artists were a bit out of their comfort zone, as they were used to drawing cutesy stuff with pastel colors and rainbows, and now they were put into a situation where they had to aim for a darker style.
The artist who was in charge of the main character’s design wanted the character to look like a basic fella, just a normal guy fanboying over Dracula.
Thus he’s seen wearing a casual sweatshirt-jeans-combo instead of any kind of armor etc.
Programmers also faced quite a few setbacks from reworking object placement to use tilemaps, and wasting time due to Unity issues. Some features were downsized a little far and probably warranted a closer look early on, but overall a lot was learned about working in Unity and using Github.
We faced a lot of problems and merge conflicts, but luckily got over all of them as a team.
In the end, there’s still a lot we could improve about our game, but we made a nice and effective sprint to polish the game to be as good as it could get with such a limited amount of time.
Team Ihamikävaa
⌨️ Programming:
Pasi Sundelin
Ville Lehdonkangas
🖌️ Art:
Oskari Ojala
Jonna Pentti