Benkei
SUMMARY OF MY WORK
PRODUCER \ SYSTEM DESIGNER \ GAME ARTIST
Creating the original concept and designing the basic system.
Fine-tuning and balancing characters and weapons using animations and the Animator tool.
Designing UI in Photoshop, making Fx with Shuriken and working on post-processes using Stack.
Managing the project's planning, creating and assigning the various tasks.
CREATE UNIQUE SELLING POINTS
The struggle between balancing quality and creativity!
Benkei is an overly ambitious project for a bunch of students. Started as Metroidvania destined for Steam, the game was designed around boss fights. The combat system itself was based on collecting and switching between weapons. Our goal wasn't on the macro features, we were devoted on just polishing and refining our fundamentals like the camera as well as the character's mobility, abilities. To that purpose, we drastically cut down our scope and became closer to a rogue-like than a Metroidvania. However a problem appeared way too late and even if the team had focused everything on polishing the most basic principles of Benkei, how would our game distinguish itself on the market?
Our team being only composed of Game Designers and Programmers, we couldn't solely ride on our universe to compensate for our lack of originality. After long meetings with the whole team and analysis of the market, we settled on the bullet hell as well as flashy combos to stand out from a saturated genre. Sadly, this choice should have been made way earlier during the development. The game "found himself" too late...