Atomic Garden Interactive

Enemy at the Gate The Barbican estate in London features a lot of the style of architecture that I wanted to emulate in the art and design project, so for this project, I'm going to try to create my own barbican estate using the real one as the palette. To do this I'm going to create concept art using the barbican as part of a reference sandwich to create unique architecture that should both be evocative of contemporary London, retrofuturist and contain elements meant to subtly guide the player through the area to their goal.

Project Design Document Player Control You control a Character in this First Person Platformer game where WASD, Shift and Space makes the player Walk, Run and Jump . Basic Gameplay During the game, an Antagonist Ghost  chases from behind the player and the goal of the game is to Escape the Antagonist Ghost . Sound & Effects There will be sound effects, Footsteps and Ambient and particle effects, Smoke and Steam Clouds . Gameplay Mechanics As the game progresses, The Platform will get more complex making it more difficult for the player to progress . There will also be an Antagonist that will attempt to catch the player and send them back to the last checkpoint . User Interface The Lives will Decrease whenever the player is caught by the antagonist . At the start of the game, the title The Barbican will appear and the game will end when the player reaches the end and escapes . Other Features The Game will include multiple animations for both the player and the NPC...

Map Take 2 This is the revised layout for the map. This map has better sightlines from each point and gives a better view of the city. It is also a lot more doable in the time I have I feel, it also has the benefit of allowing some freedom to create different spaces within it using the objects, such as a tip or rubbish area or a construction zone somewhere where the pieces for building are laid out.

How to Make Retro-Style RPG Portraits Using AI This is a video about making pixelated portraits from pictures in the style of old RPGs like Daggerfall . I definitely want to try using this technique to create portraits to illustrate who is speaking in speech bubbles or textboxes, as I feel this would greatly help with player comprehension and be a quick and easy way to make a bunch of very visually striking images. I'm thinking of using pictures of Victorians rather than fantasy characters to see if that creates an interesting aesthetic difference from what is normally associated with pixel art.  

Do the Monster Mash! I photoshopped together a variety of images I was inspired by and this was the result. I love the overall feel of this image the textures it contains, the colours and the tones all do a great job of capturing the look of decay and retro-futurism. I'm going to section this image into smaller panels and construct thumbnails to give myself a jumping-off point for this project.

Somebody forgot to set their alarm... The Text I have chosen to adapt, for the Art and Design Unit is When The Sleeper Wakes (WTSW), by H. G. Wells. I chose this based on the texts descriptions of large edifices and gossamer suspension bridges. This really got my imagination going and I have quite a few ideas I want to explore.  When The Sleeper Wakes, H. G. Wells  His first impression was of overwhelming architecture. The place into which he looked was an aisle of Titanic buildings, curving spaciously in either direction. Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang together across the huge width of the place, and a tracery of translucent material shut out the sky. Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed the pale sunbeams that filtered down through the girders and wires. Here and there a gossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers flung across the chasm and the air was webbed with slender cables. A cliff of edifice hung above him, he perceived as he glanced upward, and th...

When the rubber meets the road. The Panda here represents  Covid-19 During the course of recent events, it became clear to me that my time was somewhat limited in this project. As a result, I have elected to go with my first idea, the Dung beetle puzzle game. This should provide me with a decent opportunity to stretch myself in the implementation and iteration of mechanically without requiring nearly as much in terms of asset creation which for this project at least isn't one of the marking criteria anyway.  The Dung Beetle Puzzle Game is changing slightly to just a puzzle game but keeping the core idea of pushing a large ball around as its main mechanic. So the player characters job is to get the ball to its goal and then make their way to the exit of the stage. This gives me a solid and simple foundation to build some hopefully cool puzzles off of without bogging me down in extra systems, which if you refer to my previous ideas was rampant. Even when stating that I have eyes...

As their baleful chittering echoed ceaselessly along the walls of the catacombs, I thought "Pity the dead for they do not know to what they awaken". This game idea came to me as a platformer like 'Hollow Knight' or 'Blasphemous' with the twist that you play as something you wouldn't expect to find in a game like that like a clown or something. Then I saw this Tumblr post. This solidified the idea into a dungeon crawler in which you control night out gone wrong. The concept of controlling a group as one entity lead to some interesting ideas such as player health being displayed as the number of members in the group à la 'Pikmin' or 'Carrion'. it also made me think about what if the enemies were scared of the player and run away and your job was to catch them rather than avoid them. I would attempt to make this concept work in three levels with the first being a short series of encounters designed to show the player the controls, methods of m...

We walk in the garden of his turbulence! This game idea comes from two places, one is the film 2001 A Kight's Tale which is an  anachronistic ' Rocky rip-off', set in medieval Europe's tournament jousting scene. The other inspiration is this Tumblr post. The elevator pitch for this game is, You play a jester who through various methods must disrupt the fighting going on around you. These disruptions could include a mini Dance Dance Revolution game to distract the enemy combatants, or sitting up a tree and slinging insults at the other knights to disrupt there marching. It would take the anachronistic style of A Kight's Tale  using modern jokes and jabs to create an air of levity. It would also be an inherently non-spatial game using systems other than the movement of the player to drive player engagement.  The levels required to bring this idea to fruition would be one tutorial that sets up the 2-3 mini-games and then 2 escalation levels where these are built upon...

Hopefully not a poop idea The idea for this game comes from all the old mascot games of the late 90s early 2000s. The basic premise is that you play a dung beetle person akin to sonic or crash bandicoot, and have to go through stages moving a ball of dung from one spot to a goal. It would be, in essence, a puzzle game with light platforming. This would require 10 or so puzzles of increasing complexity split into about 3 levels. 10 puzzles sound like a lot more than it is as for instance, the first 3-4 would be some variation on push the ball to the hole. This would be to teach the player that A. that is their objective and B. that this is the primary ways of solving puzzles. So in reality the number of unique puzzles would be 5 ish. The mechanics would be simple platforming i.e jumping and moving plus the ability to push certain objects by walking into them such as the dung ball. These mechanics would escalate over time by first establishing the basics what can and can't be done an...

The Musical (Not a musical) Death intoxicates, Percy John Delf Smith For the second part of the interaction module, we have been tasked with creating a retro side scroller. I have a variety of ideas that I want to ruminate on a bit before committing to one, in the meantime to help evaluate them I wanted to make a list of criteria that each idea must be capable of achieving. This will help me manage my time better as I should be able to eliminate some ideas right off the bat, no matter how good they are, for being too complicated or time-consuming for example.

Basic rules concept 2 teams of 2 players Co-op Competitive Each team tries to escape by doing 'tasks' 'Tasks' consist of Rock paper scissors where every player throws in a rock, paper or scissors card, the team that initiated the task wins if they get *3* of a kind Collected 'items' from the board to complete a required set Once all tasks have been completed the players rush to the escape pods The teams are split so that each member starts on each side of the board Two different board ideas. 'Sync nodes' would be the 'tasks' Interesting consequences of the rules The modularity of this game idea means that the 'Tasks' or mini-games can be swapped out and replaced without affecting any of the themes or narrative elements. There are many levels of symmetry from the number of player to the team sizes to the form of the board. The elements of this game idea could easily systemise and convey a multitude of aesthetic and thematic ideas. It piggy...

Basic Rules concept Players have a set of blocks like Tetris blocks Each player has their own grid board They each take it in turns to place a block on their own grid When they place their block they announce one square that the block occupies the other players must place one of their blocks in such a way that it also occupies that square Blocks can be placed in any orientation as long as there is no unsupported overhang Elimination: each player is eliminated if their tower reaches higher than *4* blocks. Last player standing wins Interesting consequences of the rules The Players are both trying to place their own blocks in a manner which lets them make the most effective use of their space while also trying to force the opponent to place their block in the least space-efficient way. Since the location of at least part of the block is chosen by the opponents this means that there is no way for the player to simply build in different parts of the board, they are forced into conflict...

As the first part of our interaction unit, we are designing a board game using the theme symmetrical. The game will be for 2-4 players. I have to use iterative design practices to achieve this which means lots of playtesting. I started by trying to break down the theme of symmetrical into slightly more digestible parts so that figuring out how and where I could leverage the theme would be simpler. Symmetry is an interesting concept as it has a rougher common meaning and a much more precise mathematical meaning. Commonly it can mean anything from reflection, pattern, harmony to balance, whereas the mathematical meaning is that invariant under some transformations.  There is also the fact that different types of symmetry also perceptibly don't offer the same amount of symmetry, for example, reflectional symmetry is what most people think of when you mention symmetry as its the most common type seen in mirrors and commonly used in board games such as chess, but offers the lo...