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Setting & game feel
Chalice wizard is set in a dark, ancient pyramid littered with traps with the goal of reaching the end, a central chamber containing a fabled chalice.
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You play as a young but fragile wizard who fires blasts of sand to bounce up off the ground gaining momentum with each blast.
The game is made to invoke a sense of flow in players as they build up speed zooming through the deadly pyramid.
Chalice Wizard
Roles: Lead design & player system design
Time: 5 weeks
Team size: 2 Designers, 3 Programmers, 4 Artists
Tools: Tengine (Inhouse)
Platform: PC​
Genre: 2.5D platformer
Lead design
As lead designer it was my job to establish and maintain a clear vision for the gameplay for the team to follow.
Two keywords we focused on were "flow" & "danger".
These somewhat juxtaposed pillars made us strike a careful balance with every design decision between pushing the player forward emphasizing flow and hindering their progress with traps, maintaining a sense of danger.
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Image by: Massimo Mezzalira
Player systems
My main goal while designing the player systems was to create fast movement with a sense of building speed thus emphasizing flow while still letting players redirect their movement out of harm's way. To do this I opted for a direct movement speed altering approach rather than any sort of physics momentum making each consecutive bounce stack the players movement speed to a cap.
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To give players further options while chaining sand blasts we also added a charged blast mechanic letting players charge up a stronger blast going higher to go above certain level hazards.
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Initial sand blast concept
Links:
Tengine: http://tengine.se/