Blog

March 21, 2022

The style we wanted to simulate given the time, skillset and tools we had was that of paper art. While not very convoluted, Project: Papercut's art pipeline has been tailor made to create its unique look.

Starting from the design of the characters, we wanted them to look like Japanese paper art, origami. But despite the stylistic decision, we also wanted to take full advantage of the 3D aspect of our game and conserve some volume as opposed to a look closer to that of flat 2D cut-outs. This lead to most characters keeping hard edges in places to simulate creases. In order to keep these features parts of their 3D models were to be treated like moving detachable pieces. Many of the enemies were designed based on their abilities, a large variety of spiders and recognizability of their silhouettes. This led to the birth of very unique spiders, each requiring their own unique Maya rigs. The character is now animation ready.

Whereas the characters are created independently and in more standard chronological order, the environment pipeline ties heavily into the level of the game which evolves constantly so our pipeline needed to allow for that evolution. The idea was that the middle ground would be 3D while the background and the foreground would be 2D planes. This led the assets of the game to be categorized in: ornamental assets, farthest planes, gameplay related assets, foreground planes, closest background planes and decorative planes. Creating the environment assets in that order allowed us to start the process of assets creation while giving time for the solidifying of level designs. Although it might seem counter intuitive to go back and forth between details and large strokes, due to the constant evolution of game design, we needed instead to move from general to specific as opposed to from large strokes to details.

April 13, 2022

We are a few weeks from our gold milestone with only a few weeks until the demo night and the game's identity has solidified itself as a linear 2.5D action platformer but it hasn't always been that way. At the very beginning, our programmer and game designer got together united by their wish to create a metroidvania game. As metroidvania is an ambitious game genre, the two artists were sought out and brought with them their own visions of the game. This included heavy story presence, creepy horror vibes and so on. After a session of brainstorm, the things we all agreed on was the setting: Meiji Japan with a mix of western and traditional and the art style: paper-like. However still wrestled with the gameplay, whether we'd like to make a 3rd person view horror game or a 2D metroidvania since they presented benefits for different team members. After discussion with mentors and amongst the team, we decided to integrate heavy story elements and horror atmosphere into a metroidvania game much like how Metroid Dread does and create the game in a 2.5D world in order to allow the artists to demonstrate some of their skills in 3D art.
For the first half of the development process, we worked with that as game idea. But as we got closer to our deadlines, we realized the idea had been over ambitious given the time constraints and it called for many cuts. We decided to turn the game into a linear action-platformer and reduce the storytelling aspect of the game to a strict minimum and prioritize gameplay. But as we playtested along, we realized that gameplay without a minimum of enticing purpose is difficult to stand on its own. With much debate, we brought back some key elements related to story.

After this, many more cuts were made to level length, gameplay variety, environment complexity and so on. From the game's first ideas to now as we approach the release of our trailer and the release of our vertical slice, our game has gone through many changes for better or worse.

We hope you will come to enjoy what we present.

May 04, 2022

GAME LAUNCHES ON SATURDAY, MAY 28, 2022!!!

On May 28, we'll finally be able to present to you the fruit of our efforts.

For an entire year, we've worked to bring this game to life with the help of our teachers, classmates, friends and families. Our programmer, being mostly working alone, put a lot of effort to make everything function as a game, our game designer created over ten rooms, multiple traversal power-ups and more, our visual artists created the world in which it all happens, and our latest addition, our sound designer created beautiful tracks for the different moods and environment. Many of our teachers stayed with us until late at night to help us solve problems, answer our questions, and many people in our entourage gave us good feedback and took the time to playtest our game in its various phases. This game was the result of a collective effort and we are very grateful to all who contributed to its making as well as all who will spend their time playing through.

Soon, the path to explore will be open to you through our itch page as well as the event in which we will be showcasing the game.
We look forward to reading your comments and hear about your experiences. We hope you enjoy yourselves and reach the end that awaits.

Although this journey for us is coming to an end, it is also the beginning of a new chapter and we invite you to follow us on each of our individual paths which can be found here.