EMOCOLLIDE
Emocollide is a 2D platformer where players mash up Emoji parts to unleash the combined Emoji power.
WATCH THE TRAILER:
tHE pROJECT
Emocollide was developed in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team for the Foundation of Game Design course at the Centre for Digital Media during 2020 fall.
For this group project, we had the creative freedom to build a game of our choice and were expected to apply the game design principles we learned in the class, including mechanics, emotion, agency, balance, motivation, and the process of making games (plan, build, test and repeat!).
The deliverable of the project was a comprehensive game design document appropriate for real-world use, with digital prototypes to test our game design choices.
tHE tEAM
Team Hippocampus consists of five members from different fields. Everyone on the team was involved in the game design process. I worked as a Unity developer and artist, responsible for documentation, producing 2D assets, Unity Development, managing art assets, quality assurance testing, and user testing.
KEY FEATURES
Mind-boggling EmoCombo
Mix and match the base and face to create a new emoji of your own. Ranging from a poop blowing a kiss to Crying bubble tea, there are countless Emoji combinations that go well beyond reality. Your combo, your choice!
Unleash the EmoPower
After mashing up it is time to unleash the EmoPower! Blast your way through a wide range of enemies with never-seen-before EmoPower. Crazy! Colourful! Chaotic! All EmoPowers come with hand-crafted animation and unique sound design to bring you the ultimate sensation.
Challenging Rogue-lite
Every stage is filled with randomly generated enemies and Emojis. Each playthrough will be a fresh game experience. Need something more challenging? Try the permadeath mode that will bring your skills to mastery.
Game Overview
Emocollide is a 2D platformer video game in which the player takes control of the Smiley character to collide with different Emojis, gaining different powers. The game features two main categories of Emojis. Colliding with the Emoji with facial expression determines how the player will combat, such as shooting projectiles out of eyes, blowing kisses out of the mouth, and generating explosions out of the head. Colliding with Object type Emoji determines what the player will be using to combat, such as fire, ice, poop, and wasabi. With more than 50 combinations of face and base, the player can mix and match different Emojis to find out the most powerful option.
Platforming elements require the player to complete various game controller actions such as jump across gaps, climb walls and ladders, utilize the bouncing platform, wait for the moving platform, and pay attention to shattering platforms, water, and traps. With the enemies like patrolling Bumble Bee, invisible Octopus, King Cobra that will chase the player down, the player needs focus, quick actions, and tactics to avoid attack and use the most effective combination to defeat enemies and bosses.
Throughout the game world, the player will dive into six different stages - forest, space, desert, underwater, tundra waste and amusement park. Failed to stay alive during the stages will bring the player to the beginning of the stage with different sets of Emojis and platforms. Upon defeating the boss at the end of the stage, the player will gain a gem and proceed to the next stage. The player wins the game when all six gems are collected.
My Contributions
Coming up with the Game Concept
The inspiration: Twitter @EmojiMashupBot
At the start of the term, every team member needs to brainstorm a game concept and pitched it to the team. I pitched the idea of a 2D platformer with the element of mashing up Emojis. The inspiration comes from Emoji Mashup Bot, the Twitter account that creates new emojis out of random emoji parts. Those mashups are so funny and yet somehow uncannily capture the mood of our daily life. Why not make it interactive? On top of the classic platformer, we can throw in a modern twist where the player can BYOE - build your own emoji. Eventually, the team decided to build around my idea and the development of the game Emocollide is a go!
Unity Development
As the only developer on the team, I was responsible for all the Unity development in the project. For our playtests, we built the prototypes that tested the experience of mashing up with cute emojis, exploring the game environment, and attacking different enemies with different powers. Here are the tasks breakdown:
🎮 Player Control
Implemented the player controller such as walk, jump, double jump, and wall jump.
😍 NPCs
Implemented 1 Base Emoji (poop), and 4 Face Emojis (laser eyes, crying face, heart eyes blowing a kiss, and nauseated face).
✨ Emoji Mashup
Implemented the mashup mechanics: the player character collides with Base NPCs or Face NPCs and changes base or face correspondingly.
💥 Player Attack
Implemented 8 different player attacks with different projectiles.
🎥 Camera
Implemented a following camera using cinemachine.
🕷️ Enemy Patrol
Implemented different types of patrol enemies that have different damages to the players upon collision.
🍄 Levels
Implemented the normal platforms that act as a solid ground, moving platforms that patrol between points horizontally or vertically, and ladder platforms where the player can jump on from below, or step down from above.
🔊 Sound
Implemented the looping background music and sound effects for player actions.
💬 UI
Implement the menu and tutorial scenes, as well as the in-game UI such as the health bar and progress bar.
Conducting Playtests
All our playtests were conducted virtually on the course's Discord server.
Documentation
We chose to use Notion as our documentation platform as it has better support for displaying GIFs, interactive forms, and version control. Aside from maintaining the documentation versions, I contributed to the writing of high-level concepts, game features, and the Player character power spreadsheet.
Click here to view our Game Design Documentation on Notion.