Anastasis

The lead game designer mentioned Magicka 2 as a source of inspiration for the spell-crafting component of their initial concept pitch. Their spin on this was to make the spell-crafting component part of a separate tablet interface and like a sort of game in of itself. This idea is what drew me to the project, and so I placed the most importance on the spell-crafting and the tablet in my work.

The design of spell-crafting was to combine elements to craft what we called level 1 spells, which could then be further combined to make powerful level 2 or level 3 spells. The plan was to have a level 2 spell for every unique combination of level 1 spells, giving players a huge assortment of spells to discover and experiment with. I spent a fair amount of time co-designing the list of level 2 spells in the early weeks of the project, but only a few made it into the final build. Much of the spell-crafting designs hinged on a plugin being developed to modularise the process of making the spells in-engine, though this plugin was not finished. How spells interacted with the environment and enemies was also an important aspect of the game's original design. This was something more successfully achieved, as there were various interactable objects that gave spells a means to showcase their unique qualities. By the end, Anastasis was most functional as a puzzle game, though this wasn't the original intention.

Ultimately, I think the scope for Anastasis was overly ambitious, and the spell-crafting concept was likely too complex and expansive for a PAX experience. Play sessions at PAX far exceeded the 5-7 minute ballpark we were aiming for, and several players left without finishing the game. This led me to believe that even if we managed to achieve everything we had planned, it still would've been incredibly difficult to fit even a fraction of it into a decent PAX experience.

In terms of narrative, I tried to add intrigue to the tablet by positioning it within the game's lore as both a mystical and highly technologically advanced artefact belonging to an ancient sorcerer. I made the physical hardware that players used a central feature of the game's narrative, one that the protagonist themselves needed to use to get through the crypt. My goal was to immerse players more strongly by bridging the physical and digital worlds with the tablet. The plot and setting of Anastasis that I created fit into dark fantasy, but I tried to contrast this darkness with unserious details. As I am used to writing more bleak and sombre narratives, I thought this contrast would be interesting to explore. I also felt that a light-hearted experience would make the game more widely appealing to players at PAX, as opposed to an experience with an outwardly grim tone. Narrativising a modern tablet device being used in an ancient time period served to add a level of absurdity to the game. Likewise, I narrativised collecting elements through the lecterns in the game as downloading data that the tablet had lost. I tried to bolster this tonal contrast further with some sprinkles of comedic dialogue from Menephron.

I managed to get all narrative components implemented, and I felt they worked cohesively with the rest of the game. Players from PAX responded well to my writing and seemed to especially enjoy the ending scene I directed. Though I wish we could've had a more concise and polished game for PAX, even getting the opportunity to present at PAX was incredible. It was a really cool experience seeing people play our game for the first time in-person and getting their reactions.