The Freewill of Life
The Freewill of Life is a 2D platform game with three different levels illustrating three ideological statuses of life: being the beginning of life(inside the womb), the underworld seeking reincarnation, and getting into the human world. The three stages make into a game loop: as a lucky little life form, you are lucky to be born and arrive human world, or you could be sent to the underworld and seek your chance to be reborn; as a life living in the real world, you work hard, make friends and chase your dream until the final stage of your life; Then, you are back to the beginning of the process again. The game can become a never-ending loop unless the player presses the "stop button" manually. By arriving at the exit located at each level, players will proceed to different worlds.
The player character designed here is a fire-like "soul," rigged and animated with Idle, Run, and Jump states. The character also has different facial expressions in different behavior statuses. The character is colored differently in different levels, which suggests the mood and condition. We designed our levels, or in other words, proposed stages of life are ranged in three different hard levels. It may not start with the easiest one, and the reason is that we want the players to try themselves and guess what we might mean by that based on our design background.
How to play:
Use WSAD for basic moving and SPACE for jumping!
Press the "Stop" button at the bottom right corner when you want to quit the game!
Each level will have an introduction UI at the beginning to teach players how to make it through!
Game Developer:
Grace Guo: Graphic & UI;
Jiayue Gou: Interactive game coding;
Sarita Sun: Animation & Level setup;
Playtesting & Debugging cooperated by everyone
Resource:
- Graphic assets: Created by Grace Guo
- Sound resource from:
0 level background music: Yinyues - Everything
-1 level & start menu background music: Tempo - hello_world
1 level bgm: Goldmund - The Wind Wings
Development log
- The Freewill of Life - PostmortemApr 07, 2021
- The Freewill of Life - Design ProcessApr 07, 2021
Comments
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This is a quite complished game with nice music and well-designed scene settings and ideas. I espescially love the illustrations and the subtle animations of the fire. However, I still think it is a little unclear when I try to play it. The gap is a little wide for the player to jump into it.
The whole storyline is quite incredible and the way how you guys created the atmosphere of this game makes me, as a player who always addicted to this mystery style, engaging in it so much. I would say this is a game with high difficulty and it takes to figure out how to play. The entry toward different worlds is kind of tricky to get into. The gap between each platform also is a little bit wide to jump left and right.
Love the game's narrative and it is very polished! The spirit is animated really well, and you guys did amazing illustrating everything. Also, not being the best gamer out there, I appreciate there being a -1 lvl as well.
Some things to keep in mind:
1. in -1 lvl I felt like maybe there's too much of the collectable things when you only need 10, so makes it super easy (maybe that's what you want). Some collectables on the top were not being collected.
2. Door is hard to find as I am able to move in the space up down left and right.
Good work guys! ;)
Great visual style and perfect music choice. I really like the idea of having to give money to the bad guy to pass hahah, also when you're doing demo, you can afford giving money to the bad guy cause as long as you have 1 left before you end the game then it's fine, this really got me thinking of some wise words of life.... I noticed the animation is not 100% smooth, not sure if it's my broswer's problem tho. But the facial expression of the charater is so cute!
PS. This is somehow the only one game i can open on my safari, wondering how you guys did the building... XD
I like your team's game concept of making the gameplay an infinite loop, never played a game that goes loop back to the beginning at the end. Great graphic and UI, I would say the only thing is the introduction on the UI panel is too long, maybe make the gameplay more intuitive instead of using word to explain every rule? Great game I hope to see your team working together in the future!
The design of the style is reason enough to play it. It is clear you thought through the whole thing from the start and knew where you wanted to take it. Looks like a pro game I think its got a lot of potential
Wow I love the narrative of the game and how your music and illustrations all add up to create this spiritual experience. I agree with some of the other feedback - I can't jump from the cloud structure but otherwise this is amazing how the different levels have unique music, objectives, and obstacles!
This is a vast improvement from last week! The level designs, music, animations, difficulty are all amazing. I do like that we have a different way to end the game in the afterlife level. Great work!
Omg, the illustrations are so beautiful! This really feels like something eternal and spiritual. I wonder how you came up with the idea? And for these wonderful illustrations would be great to add some sounds and music to create engagement with the gameplay. I also stuck in the colliders several times, not sure why, maybe the shape of the colliders is complicated? And also somehow I get teleported to the next level from the second when I fall. I really wanna see more of this beautiful story and drawings!
Thanks! We've rebuilt the game, now there're music and sound effects. Also the collider thing should be fixed!
The illustration and animation is fantastic, I can see you spent tons of time on the. I'm really glad to see that each level has a different theme and color of the player and also environment is changed according to the current theme. But I encountered some colliding issue that I get stuck in to the platform and then I just drop down to the bottom and somehow I get into the second scene. I believe it can be fixed easily, not a big issue. In general this game is so well made, really like it!
I really like the illustration of the game and the animation looks very smooth. When I play for the second level it seems like I fall to somewhere and directly into the third level I don't know it's a bug or not. Over all I really like it
The illustration is so nice and goes very well with your topic I think. I like how you include instructions and intro before each level, keeping the storyline very clear. But I think there is something wrong with maybe collider of those cloud-like structure. I got stuck in them sometimes and not able to come out. Otherwise, I think the concept and style of your game is very well done, and I really enjoy playing!
I feel this game is really poetic. It has something to do with the graphics. The characters are beautiful but not too cute, so they fit the concept very well. I played this game during the playtest, and I feel it becomes easier to play and more interesting. I like the design of the underworld. Its blue color differentiates it from the rest of the levels. In the underworld, I need to collect things. Different missions on different levels really make the game more playable. The only thing that might be a problem is that in the underworld I seem not able to jump if I hit a certain “cloud”. Also, I can't reach part of my soul that on the highest platform...