Solo Project

GMD-210 Principles of Game Design Final

(October 15, 2024 - December 10, 2024)

Unroll is a unique take on the endless scroller shoot-em-up genre, in which you glide across an unrolling scroll of paper as a sentient blob of ink and run over words to protect them from getting destroyed.

Play the game!

A quite-literal 2D scroller.malcolmfullstop.itch.io/unroll

The Pitch

I had to create an infinite scroller. These aren't the most appealing genre to me as while they can be quick and dirty bouts of fun at their best, my opinion is that all of them are too samey. Play one, played em all. I wanted to create one that would break this monotony. After the initial brainstorming process for possible themes and interesting mechanics to add onto the infinite scrolling, I settled on this:

"The game is contextualized as being within a scroll being unfurled at both ends. The player chooses which direction they want it to unfurl, and that changes the direction of scrolling."

Main Mechanic and Objective

At some point, the idea of changing direction mid-gameplay came to me and I realized that the game could have a dynamic, non-linear movement system and still fall into the definition of an infinite scroller. The player can bounce off of enemies and the edges of the playspace to change direction and cause physics reactions.

The olden scroll theming led me to draw inspiration from my Jewish upbringing, basing the scroll's unrolling off how the Torah (Old Testament to other religions) is unrolled. The most prominent rule that comes to mind when it comes to reading the Torah is that you cannot touch the Torah's paper with your hands, because the grease/sweat on your hands will easily make the century-old paper dissolve. With this inspiration, I devised the goal as being to save the scroll from being dissolved. What started as a fairly bare-bones side scroller quickly turned into a fast-paced, semi-strategic shoot-em-up about defending units from enemy attacks.

Unroll Weekly Testing

Testing Forms

Research & Testing

With the exception of one week, player testing was conducted weekly, with my classmates acting as testers. Some very necessary information was gained through playtests. While I initially wanted to balance out the player's ability to bounce off enemies, making it more challenging and even having each bounce damage the player, testers wanted to be able to bounce off of enemies more. In response to testing feedback, I added the wall enemy that doesn't fire at you and acts as an intentional bounce-off point--at the cost of being lethal to words--and even removed the damage that enemy bouncing did to the player by the end.

The brunt of the research wasn't into the genre of side scrolling shoot-em-up, as I was already familiar with them. Rather, the majority of research was done on the game's aesthetic and technical capabilities. While this was not my first solo project in Unity, it was the largest and most demanding yet, requiring that I learn a lot of new aspects about the engine--including how save data via JSON files and particle events work, just to name two examples. The art style and narrative took inspiration not only from other games but from religious texts, old novels and animation.