The Pitch

The goal given to me was 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 two concepts that I thought simply sounded the most eciting to toy with. One of those two concepts was 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."

This idea would become the basis for Unroll, which ultimately won out between the two concepts I was picking between due to its simplicity.

The Road to Unroll

While the initial idea was simply dodging enemies on an infinite*, expanding scroll, I figured this would prove too repetitive and perhaps too poorly balanced skillset-wise--relying on only the player's ability to react to things flying at them quickly. At some point, the idea of changing direction mid-gameplay, instead of at checkpoints, came to me (perhaps it was from one of the rejected concepts and I just merged it into this one--I don't remember), 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 game then became focused on expanding the scroll outward by repeatedly changing directions, with the player now having to intentionally collide with enemies to bounce off of them in the other direction.

But now, there needed to be an additional goal that gave purpose to unrolling the scroll. 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. From this memorized tradition, combined with how printed ink on paper naturally fades over time, I devised the goal as being to save the scroll from being destroyed. The enemies became liquid spills on the paper, the player became a blob of ink, and the goal was to fly over the words printed on the scroll to ink them, while knocking the enemies away from the words to prevent their dissolving of them. 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.

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.