Rewinder - Tutorial

Summary

The idea of a "time limited first person parkour games" can be very complex for some people because of the fast pacing and quick reflexes it will command.

We targeted a really special audience at first, but as a school project it was asked of us to make it accessible for our end-of-the-year jury, so our challenge was to find a balance and a pleasing experience for our core players and the jury's members, while thinking about the general public who would discover our school with this project.

Parkour introduction

In Rewinder, the player cannot stop running.

It forced me to adapt all the scene's objects's position based on the metrics created by the speed and the force the character was using.

The difficulty was to maintain a clear level comprehension at fast speed. Every informations had to be readable at first glance.

Our main mechanic allow the player to freely interact with their envirronment, so for the really first part (which act as a tutorial), I decided to create a slowest learning curve progression than for the other levels. The idea was for the player to be able to test everything with little consequences.

Each parts act as an exposition to a new mechanic, while last parts are validation.

Jump and slide don't have validation level because they are classic mechanics that every player we target could easily undersood.

Further informations

The tutorial is divided into different parts, separated by fake portals and a short jump down. Reaching the portal is the main objectives of every level, it allows us to create a habit in the form of a foreshadowing.

The graphisms also serves as a learning purpose, by increasing the global fog, we help the player to focus on the actual tutorial and prevent him to be distracted by the ever moving envirronment.

Improvement :

After our playtests, it was clear that the last parts were too long.

More importantly, our player had to reach floating orbs to open the exit portals, but the mechanic wasn't clear enough and player would often "die" not understaning what they did wrong.

To fix it, I decided to replace the last part by a straight line with a clear sight of the portal, starting by an orb and embellished by several bloc on which the player could freely climb.

We also changed the way we gave keyboard indication to the player by displaying a message which appear on the first top tier of the screen, and disappear after 3 secondes in a glitch. Was also added the main objectif each time the player use the rewind function; "Escape from this place."