Edvin Nordangård

A small ant in a suddenly quieter world, she has to find her way through the wreckage of everything she once knew — blocked tunnels, hostile strangers, and a home that no longer feels like one. Some losses don’t have a fix. But some endings are also beginnings.

Myrstig is a 2.5D platformer about finding your way home through a world that has become very large and very hostile. Inspired by Limbo, it’s quiet and atmospheric, focusing less on challenge and more on the journey itself. Navigate the tunnels and roots of the forest floor and the remains of the colony, outrun fire ants, and outsmart the ones you can’t. The platforming is forgiving, the levels are short, and the world does most of the storytelling.

In this project I was responsible for everything physics related. It was my first time working with collisions and doing so in TGE, TGA's own engine, so the code is honestly not something I'm proud of. I was actually so unhappy with what I had built that after our course in software architecture and design patterns I went back and started building a proper collision and trigger box system from scratch, just to prove to myself that I could do better. I never fully finished it, but it was a big step up from what ended up in the game.

The dragging, picking up and throwing mechanics were also mine, since those all tied into the physics and colliders. These ended up being pretty central to the gameplay since you could move stones to climb up and reach new areas, reposition flesh eating plants so they wouldn't get you, or throw a rock at one to stop it from biting. There was also a sugar cube you had to find and bring back to your colony, which meant picking it up, putting it down and pushing or pulling objects to get through the map.

This is far from my proudest project, but it's probably the one I learned the most from. Working outside of an established engine like Unity and building things from the ground up is a whole different challenge, and this taught me that when something is going to be complex, it's worth taking the time to research and plan a proper system for it. It makes everything that follows so much easier.

The game is currently downloadable from jidd3r to play.

Click HERE to go to it.