Polaris

Polaris is a narrative-driven platformer about a wondrous being trying to return fallen stars to their home in the sky.

Here Polaris has just hurled themselves from a spider enemy and has received an extra jump for it.

For our 2D-platformer we decided to use Ori and the Blind Forest as our reference for gameplay and, to some degree, narrative presentation. In the end we managed to not use any written or spoken storytelling and still tell a weird otherworldly tale that felt coherent. I think this speaks well of our narrative which resonated well with the whole group.

This is how we could easily build levels using terrain that I had set up.

During this project I looked into ways to make our level design within Tiled more streamlined. I tried to make sure that we had Tiled-terrains set up for all different environments we would build and that all gameplay elements had a clear connection to our workspace and weren't abstracted into too many JSON-files.

A script I set up made it easier for us to create platforms among other things.

I set up our terrains using Tiled’s built-in terrain editor but I also added a set up for creating platforms without having to hand place every single tile. This was something that the built in tools couldn’t offer.

The blue dots pictured above had to be in the workfiles for the tool to work and we simply didn't render that tile from the tilesheet in the engine.

Polaris is rescuing one of the fallen stars.

This project coincided with the first covid-19-related lockdown in Sweden which meant that this project became my introduction to working from home on a TGA project. The whole process of moving work to my home ended up actually working well and it is a situation that I have gotten well adjusted to. I have always seen myself as a committed colleague and am pleased to see that that didn’t change because of the current situation.

Polaris Ascension.