Revival is a 2D platform role-playing game with 2D animated cutscene. In this project my team mate Frank Cui and I were trying to explore the environmental storytelling methods. As the game follows an AI android (player character)’s journey, we are showing the hidden story by the design of game background environment and having cutscene to help the players to understand the game while expressing the messages without help of texts or audio dialogues in cutscenes.
This game is an imagination of what would world be like without human society in thousand years after. In this project I tried to depict human culture from other beings’ eyes, therefore I considered to have an AI android as the player character. As the game background is set in the future where human are no longer being the master of the earth, it is a story of the AI robot exploring the ‘new world’ and learning about human’s past histories during his journey.
In this project I am in charged with game arts and character animations. Also, I am interest in producing cutscene for this game as Frank and I are making the game with 2D pixel art style to save time on making game assets, there is a limitation on making animations in game with pixel arts. Therefore, apart from the game I also focus on cutscenes’ production and trying to create a few animated clips to help the players understand the specific scene or showing the details of an environment when the players achieved something or arrived somewhere.
For our game project, we were inspired by Hollow Knight(2017) which does not have much dialogues during the whole gameplay, exploring the game environment is the major way to gather information. So, the aim of this project is trying to convey the messages without using text or dialogue. When making the cutscene, I have experimenting on character’s body language and facial expressions to show his emotions, also exploring how to improve the cutscene utilizing film techniques.
