Echelon
2019 ⬤ "First game and first Blender experience"
Summary
This short proof-of-concept game, created in the old Blender 2.79 game engine, was my first major Blender and game project alike, as a college assignment. It features a cube moving across a grid to collect casino chips, with turn-based moving platforms and lasers, across 4 levels. A poster was also created, hypothetically to advertise the game.
The Game
Echelon is a simple isometric puzzle game about moving a cube along a grid of tiles, one movement at a time. The goal is to collect all of the chips in each of 4 increasingly-difficult short levels, contending with moving platforms and harmful projectiles that each move by 1 tile whenever the player moves, creating a turn-based experience. Falling off of the map or being in the same tile as a projectile means game over, restarting from the current stage.
From the title screen, you can choose to play the game or view an instructional screen telling you the controls and what to collect or avoid, which is animated to stay interesting. In gameplay, the WASD keys are used to move in any of four directions, and there is a clickable pause menu in the top left which brings up options to restart, disable the background (with secret easter eggs that add visual filters to the screen) or go back to the main menu. If you lose, a game over screen appears with different lighting/colours per level, giving the same options as the pause menu to restart or quit to the menu. If you beat all 4 levels, a win screen is presented from which you can only return to the menu.
The entire game is designed as if it were for mobile, as this was part of the brief. As a result, the UI is basic and tappable, including the fold-down pause menu, and gameplay is extremely simplistic with four directional inputs. If it were actually released for mobile, this could easily be translated to four directions of swiping, which would make the game even easier to grasp since diagonal swipes could be more intuitive for the isometric perspective than the tilted WASD experience.
The Poster
After creating the game, we were tasked with designing and creating a poster that would "advertise" it, theoretically in a setting similar to ads printed on bus stop shelters. I created 3 prototype designs and chose the second to tweak into a final design, using some of the cooler aspects of the other designs. I created a logo for the game's name, as well as a subtitle/tagline of "Now It's Your Turn", referring to the turn-by-turn gameplay. I also created a fake game company logo of "Cactia Games" based on my personal icon, and a couple of fake review quotes as effectively lorem ipsum text for the poster. (Obviously, neither IGN nor any "Pocketgamer" had anything to say about this unreleased minimum-viable-product demo made in private for an educational assignment.) The main focal points of each poster are the cube character and a neon grid, with a focus on cyan, lilac and white as a colour scheme for a cool robotic feel without entirely depending on the sci-fi blue trope.
Just in case: no this game is not reviewed, for sale, or on the App Store. The posters below are mockups for if a full game had been created, and their text content is essentially lorem ipsum.
Site font: Atkinson Hyperlegible
Apart from the above, all content was created by me, CactusMagelord, unless otherwise stated.
"Everyone had to name their game 'Echelon' as part of the brief, so there are likely hundreds of Echelons out there over the years. I doubt many of them have anything to do with an actual echelon."