Making a game in 5 days: Willpower

Download link through TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/HwunISkz

In this page you will find all the content I produced during my first one week Game Jam.

🎮 A game jam is an event where participants try to make a video game from scratch in a very restricted amount of time.

• Story
• Booklet
• Banner
• Poster
• Assets
• UI elements

WILLPOWER

While my teammate Oreste Leone was focused on the code, I was in charge of creating every visual aspect of the game.

The goal for this challenge was to make an “Arcade” game.

From the very beginning, my gameplay idea was to have an intuitive, yet challenging experience. Giving the player a learning curve that would change every time they restarted the level, has been proved to be effective in terms of engagement.

Every new try, the player gets more and more used to how the game works, and the time-increasing difficulty ensures a boredom-less interaction.

Story

Since humankind has memory, the world was continuously threatened by strange and mysterious creatures. While there’s people who accept their “fate” and live in constant terror, brave warriors refuse to give up.

One of them is Orteus, a young aspiring paladin that you command in order to defeat invading enemies. His defense skills, despite the juvenile age, surpass even the strongest shieldmaster.

Booklet

First page

Second page

PDF Version: WILLPOWER BOOKLET MERGED.pdf

The main inspiration for the realisation of this booklet came from SNES’ ones: simple yet effective cover and back, detailed game explanation and greyscale/low saturation colours.

By applying the exclusion filter and tinkering with the opacity on the starry night cover, I managed to obtain the old paper-like colour and texture I wanted.

From there, every other element is added above the modified background layer with a luminosity filter, in order to carry on the “nostalgic” colour theme.

BANNER / POSTER

Willpower banner

Willpower poster

On the opposite side of the booklet, I wanted both banner and poster to be colourful and a bit more rich on the quantity of elements displayed.

In particular, the poster has been structured to resemble the original gameplay screen.

ASSETS

Regardless of my challenge boundaries, I would have chosen Pixel Art as art style, not only because it is my favourite, but also because my skill with freehand drawing is… questionable.

Being a novice on the subject, I took some inspiration and started from recreating tutorials online, becoming each day more proficient and understanding various art fundamental concepts.

For this project I used an online tool called Piskel, which allows you to create and also animate pixel art. One of the tools I found most useful and interesting was “Lighten/Darken”. It allows you to easily give “depth” to your drawings, defining shadows and light points by altering flat colours (clear examples of this concept applied can be seen on UI elements such as score box and restart arrow).

Characters and animations

Other UI elements

Final thoughts

Despite the “willpower” to carry on with this project, unfortunately time and circumstances do not allow us to continue (for now).

But fear not, many features and additions already went through the workshop of thoughts. It is just a matter of time to add even more challenging enemies, a complete storyline, levels, counterattacks (yes, defeating the boss in front of you!) and much, much more.

Thanks for reading this far, I’m really happy and surprised about the result achieved is such a small amount of time and I look forward to participating in other challenges like this one.

And special thanks to my dear old friend Oreste Leone; I had the pleasure to see him again after years and work with him to achieve (even if in a small part) our dream as children: making a videogame together.