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.