Project Description

To Harbor is a short alt ctrl game developed in 4 days for Sheridan Bachelor of Game Design's Fall 2022 Design Week challenge. You play the role of a lighthouse keeper, tasked with fending off light-adverse eldritch horrors from incoming ships by rotating a physical lighthouse controller. The goal is to make it to the end of 5 nights, hopefully with every ship intact.

Our team of 5 students, Wicked Wickies, managed to implement a tutorial, fully voice acted dialogue, SFX, and multiple fully illustrated endings within the 4 day time limit.

Process Work

Concepting

The Fall 2022 Design Week challenge was to design a game with an alt ctrl (alternative control) scheme. We spent the first day brainstorming design ideas.

I drew up a concept for a game using a lantern as a controller. Players would cover and uncover lights with aluminum foil sensors to spawn/attack ghosts.

We found several immediate flaws in the idea but the concept was compelling. Our team combined this concept with another for narrative and came up with a design for a game about a lighthouse that warded off sea monsters.

Our team worked together to establish a basic gameplay loop and flowchart.

Rapid iteration

Aside from digital technologies, our team also made use of our table's whiteboard quickly sketch concepts and progression diagrams. While the rest of the team was working on the gameplay flowchart, the other half of us created charts for menu/screen flow and ending conditions.

We also drew up diagrams for the controller.

I used sticky notes to flesh out several aspects of the game's design in relation to visuals and aesthetics.

This is one of my early storyboards I created for the tutorial/opening.

Through this short sequence, players would quickly discover the objective of the game and its core mechanics while also being instilled with a sense of horror.

This is another early mockup I did for To Harbor's main menu and controls. One of the challenges was figuring out how a controller that only rotated could be used to select menu options and prompts. We came up with the idea of holding the light over a gauge that slowly filled up to confirm selection.

We later mapped a button for resetting the gyro sensor as a QOL measure but we wanted players to engage with the game using only the rotation action.

Bridging Art & Design Intent

The implementation of sketchy black and white visuals was an intentional design choice.

We needed To Harbor to have a visual identity that supported the encompassing experience of fending off against wholly imperceivable horrors.

This was accomplished by using stark contrasting values to limit player information and highlight elements of notice. Both ships and monsters blend into the blackness making them invisible outside of the lighthouse's beam. This causes tension, uncertainty, and fear.

Inversely, anything inside the beam is strongly contrasted by white, which increases visibility and draws attention.

Use of colour is scarce. For objects tied to win conditions, colour is used to draw attention to their positions and status. When a ship spawns, you can see their red and green lights in the water. When a ship is on low health, it glows with orange flames. Monsters on low health glow with purple flames both to help players track and finish them off while also being indicative of their dangerous status.

Limiting the colour pallet and level of polish also kept our scope low and allowed me to produce more artwork.