Howie and Yarla
Above: Eating demons charges Yarla’s special attack.
Team size: 28
Target platforms: PC, Mac
Premise: Howie and Yarla is about a nerdy teenager who just wants to have more friends, but before that can happen, he has to deal with a twisted form of puberty. On his 16th birthday, Howie finds out he’s half-demon when he discovers the snake-like Yarla growing out of his back. This event opens up a portal that enables other demons to come into the real world and invade Howie’s high school.
According to game director Colin Horgan, the team is aiming for the kind of darkly humorous tone you see with cartoons on Adult Swim (Rick and Morty was a big influence). That helps explain a peculiar scene from the demo when Howie was chasing after a giant slice of pizza that had eyes, legs, and … a butt.
“I’m a big fan of horror games — Silent Hill 2 is one my favorite games ever — so I wanted to have a bit of that psychological influence be put in there, like a lot of focus on the id, Freudian theory, and stuff like that,” said Horgan. “That kind of comes up with the metaphors going on in the midst of our silly action game. … And there’s even a silly little bit with the pizza having a butt: adding that psychosexual element to things because that is a big part of puberty, too. It’s something we wanted to try to grapple with.”
How it plays: Horgan cites developers Platinum Games and Vlambeer as inspiration for the combat system. By using Yarla’s tentacles, Howie can attack with quick strikes or grab enemies and toss them at bigger monsters. Holding down the grab button also widens Yarla’s mouth, and when it’s fully extended, Yarla can devour smaller creatures and convert them into energy for a special fireball-spewing attack.
Though combat didn’t feel as tight as it should be, it was one of the most impressive parts of the demo, something I didn’t expect from just looking at the lovely 2D graphics.
What they hope to finish by spring: With the core mechanics set, the student developers will focus on adding more levels, enemies, and powers. The plan is to have the high school act as a hub world from which the player can select new missions. Horgan says that for their final presentation, they want to have a “polished, tight 40 minute-ish experience that shows ‘This is what Howie and Yarla is.’”
Vanishing Point
Above: Rose can make objects bigger or smaller with her powers.
Team size: 20
Target platforms: PC, Mac
Premise: Vanishing Point puts you in the shoes of Rose, a girl with a rare condition called Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS). In real life, the disability affects the way you see things: Objects may appear larger or smaller than they actually are. In this game, the developers turned it into a superpower. Rose can change the size of things like boxes and staircases with the help of a special glove. She uses this to solve a series of puzzles within a hospital’s test chambers.
The size-manipulation feature was something team lead Max Cohen built during his Intermediate Game class (one of the prerequisites for Advanced Game). Lead producer and co-creator Sam Sandweiss wanted to find a way to work that mechanic into a story, and that’s when he read about AIWS. They were careful about not turning the disability into a gimmick, and they reached out to medical advisers and game writers to collect feedback on how they wanted to portray AIWS in the game.
“We thought that there was an opportunity, narratively, to do something a little bit different, to talk about these themes but [not] do it in the stereotypical way that every other game has done in the past,” said Sandweiss.
Above: The first test chamber reminded me of Portal.
How it plays: I couldn’t help but compare Vanishing Point to other first-person puzzle-solving games. The stark white walls of the first test chamber and the mysterious voices coming over the room’s speakers made me immediately think of Portal, which also introduced a cool way to solve puzzles. Like the Portal gun, however, Rose’s power has a few restrictions. You can only use it on specific objects, and they have a limit to how big or small they can grow. The mechanic itself is simple: You just have to hold down one of the mouse buttons and either walk toward (to shrink) or away (to enlarge) from whatever it is you want to change.
What they hope to finish by spring: The team wants to tell a complete story for their project, but they didn’t realize how hard it’d be to create a narrative-focused 3D game until this past semester, when they all started working with the Unreal game engine for the first time. Over the next few months, they’ll refine Rose’s power and add some variety to the test chambers so that they all feel different from each other (one example Cohen gave was a biology chamber covered in plants and trees).
“The grand irony is we were so worried about having enough content for the showcase today, but we ended up having too much, which is a good place to be,” said Sandweiss. “That puts us in a good position for next semester because we have a whole ‘nother semester to polish what we have. As opposed to creating new content, we can really go back and say, ‘Do we need this?’ or ‘How can we make this better?’”
Pareidolia: A Cast of Shadows
Above: You have to use two devices to play Pareidolia.
Team size: Around 30 to 35
Target platforms: Wii U, PC, Mac, iOS
Premise: Pareidolia’s story is so ambitious that it needs two devices to tell it: a computer and an iPad (you sync them by connecting to the same router). The monitor is home to a series of stylized 2D platforming levels inspired by different folklore from countries like Ireland, Africa, and China. On the tablet, you play as a shadow puppeteer who can manipulate 3D shapes. The shadows that these objects cast are actually the platforms and obstacles you’ll find in the 2D world.
How it plays: While the current setup is just a temporary solution — the developers want to make Pareidolia for the Wii U and its tablet-like GamePad controller — the two-screen concept worked almost flawlessly. The iPad was a versatile tool. When you aren’t moving 3D shapes around, it serves as your controller for moving your character in the 2D world. You can change which mode you’re in by opening and closing its digital curtains.
The actual platforming felt a little sluggish and unresponsive, especially when it came to timing my jumps, but everything else felt pretty smooth. It was cool to see what I was doing on the small screen immediately affect my situation on the big screen.
It’s also possible to make Pareidolia work with a smartphone instead of a tablet, but Aamod Walavalkar, one of the engineers on the project, told me that it wouldn’t be a great experience. Phones lack the screen size and fidelity necessary to make the precise adjustments you need in the 3D levels.
Above: The boulder you see here is something you can grab and move around with the tablet.
What they hope to finish by spring: The Pareidolia crew spent most of the fall semester building the technological infrastructure to support the two-screen design. Creative director Alex McNamara said getting that to work took a lot of “research, play testing, and trial-and-error.” Now that the foundation is almost done, they can start focusing on creating more content. The story they have in mind will unfold over three acts, but since the next five months might not be enough time to accomplish that goal, they’re aiming to finish the prologue (what I played) and the first two acts.
If Pareidolia is in good shape by then, they want to continue working on the game well past graduation day.
“Most of us are graduating in May, so we hope [the spring showcase] sort of springboards us into the opportunity to finish the game, finish the narrative arc, and have a really cohesive and polished piece,” said McNamara.