The Freewill of Life - Design Process

The background story of this game is based on real-life cases. As a group made up of 3 designers from different fields, we all care about social problems, especially how to present the aspects and reflect them into our design. We started brainstorming with multiple recent social problems we've seen from the news, and by going deeper into the topic, our discussion leads to a point about life.  

Concept

We started building our concept by looking into some recent popular news and social problems. A few of the topics have been discussed a lot on Chinese social media: surrogacy, race, and abortion. Combining our thoughts, we realized that we are talking about the meaning of life and human rights. We believe that no matter what kind of "forms" human life is presenting with, we should be able to make our decisions. We believe that life is a journal, and the most important thing is to try and experience what it brought to you, rather than regretting and keep suspecting. Bringing some Buddhism theory into our concept, incarnation, we decided to make the game structure into a complete loop. 

Game Structure Design

When it comes to the game structure design, we made a diagram to better illustrate the idea. The player would start from level "0", which is inside the womb as a tiny life form. The player is designed as a fire-like creature, which represents the "soul." We try to make this level the easiest one, and the platform will be experienced from top to bottom. When the player arrives at the bottom and finished the level, it means that the player is able to be born into the human world and thus get to level "1." If the player could not make it to the bottom, which means, being dismissed by other existing characters, the player would not be able to be born and then get to the underworld, level "-1". 

The hidden world is a journey for the lost soul to get back to the womb again, in Buddhism and our culture, we believe life could get incarnation and our soul could get chances to experience the human world again. The process in this level is to collect enough "essence" for the soul to be able to be born again. 

We decided to make the real world level, level "1", the hardest level. During this life journey, we could meet a lot of things, and we are just like Sisyphus pushing the stone again and again to experience the sweetness and bitterness of life. We designed different characters to either help or hurt the player, and the goal is to keep trying to get it through. The human world is not easy, to be born is just the start.

Playtesting

We've suffered so much at the playtesting stage as always. The main problem is with the colliders. Since our platforms are all in special shapes, we have to use non-geometrical colliders to fit the shapes. We chose edge colliders for the first time, and our player just keeps dropping inside the shape through the collider which took us most of the time to fix. We later figured that the polygon collider is the best for it. 

Another problem we've met is the dislocation of colliders with animation moving. We met the problem that the collider wouldn't move with the animated character, and the player is so easy to die since the collider of the enemy is not fit into the enemy animation. Later we figured that the collider was being added to the empty object being made to incorporate the animated object instead of the character itself. 

What's more, we did so much testing and adjusting in the scene setup. We did not design it at first, but directly prototyped in Unity, so it took so much time to set up the platforms, enemies, and collectible objects to a logical situation. 

We've also encountered problems like UI, counting system, the movement, and control of players. Unity sometimes is so confusing that it works on one's computer, but after updating it doesn't work. Our team had a really good experience cooperating with each other, but figuring out problems that comes from Unity sometimes really consumes our patients and energy. But we support each other to move forward, and together complete this game which we all love!