Caravan To the End

Caravan To The End was was developed for a local game company, which commissioned the development of a prototype for testing idea and evaluating game concepts.

Specifics of the project

Team of 5.
Developed with Unity 2019 in 3 months.
The target platforms are mobile devices.
Software used: Asepirite and Photoshop CC 2019.
My roles: Game Designer and 2D Artist.

Project Objectives

The objective of the game was delivering a complete MVP to a professional client. For this purpose, a team of five students worked on a concept based on client’s requirements: the game was meant to be playable on mobile devices and was based on a Caravan management game similar to Oregon Trail.

My role in this project was enstablishing the game mechanics, contributing to the documentation and creating the basic 2D art assets to deliver the game experience.

Gameplay Overview

Caravan to the End is a single player management game for mobile devices. It employs both RPG and turn based strategy game elements. In the Underworld, a hell in which demons, devils and humans live in city-states, the player’s caravan must travel to safely escort a Saint back to the real world. Players have to manage resources and staff to overcome the dangers of the underworld and complete their task.

This game blends RPG features such as character classes and turn-based combat, with travelling mechanics similar to the ones of games such as Oregon Trail. The project includes character customization, multiple locations, an economic system, relationship management and a dialogue system.

Development

For this project. the majority of the team members were game designers. Therefore, after the preproduction stage, all designers worked on a secondary role to fill the lack of artists in the group. Although I mainly worked as a designer - creating pre-production material and writing the documentation along with the other designers - I also created the majority of 2D assets and worked closely with programmers to help with the implementation.

During the planning, which lasted around three weeks, the game designers focused on building a solid concept behind the game. For this purpose, I made a paper prototype to help enstablishing every aspect of the gameplay. For the rest of the module, I spent all my efforts fine-tuning mechanics, drawing 2D assets and working alongside programmers. My work with 2D art can be found at this link. I also wrote a short visual guide to help other designers create smaller pieces of art. This guide can be found at this link

Takeaway from this coursework

The production of Caravan to the End was a collaborative project which contributed to improve my teamworking and organisational skills. Coordinating with other developers is the foundation of game development and during this project we, as a team, worked by giving feedback and constructive criticism to each other to achieve a satisfying quality for the final product.