Mountains & Seas
Mountains and Seas is my six-month graduation project in which I should developed in spare time and have three classes to discuss it with tutor. In this project, I started with a topic that I was interested in, found out some limitations of this theme in today’s society through investigation, and put forward an idea related to game design. Finally, I completed the implementation of the core gameplay in the prototype stage.
Introduction
«The classic of mountains and seas» is an ancient Chinese book that records the stories of different creatures out of imagination. This book is merely forgotten by this generation, because the digital entertainment consumes more and more of their spare time. In this project, I tried to express the unique point in the book – more than 300 creatures with different looks, stories and special skills, so as to attract people’s attention to it.
Researches
There are two researches that are helpful to the development of the project.The first is the theory of Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment proposed by Jenova Chen, so as to achieve the high concentration and satisfaction experience of the state of ‘flow’ in psychology.
The other one is the re-design of the Celestial Brush in the game «Okami», which concentrates on the special powers of the Celestial Brush. In Japanese mythology, the Celestial Brush has 13 forms and skills, and developers have added them as the core gameplay to okami to impress players. For example, by switching the weapon to the Celestial Brush who controls the moon and drawing circles in the sky, the scene can be turned into night.
Gameplay
Mountains and seas is an open sandbox game which starts with a tutorial of teaching basic operations. It refers to the theory of dynamic difficulty adjustment, and creates the puzzles of the same difficulty level arranged in concentric circles.
Concretely, the gameplay of each creature is specific, designed by its special abilities described in the book. For example, according to the legend, the bird Biyi always come in pairs and only a pair of lovebirds can fly together. Thus, the gameplay here is that players will firstly collect the pieces of them, place them in the right place and rotate them like solving a 3d puzzle. Once finished, the status will recover and carry the player to the mainland of mountains and seas.
More interesting, in the legend, the candle dragon opens its eyes which brings the day and closes its eyes which brings the night. So the gameplay here is coherent: in the boundless darkness, the player needs to find the candle dragon’s eyes through the clue, and wakes it up and the world turns back to the day. As players arrive at each new mission, there will be a sign about this creature, and as they approach, there is an audio description of its history and its special ability, which serves to convey the contents of the mountains and seas and enhance a sense of immersion.