CORVUS

WASD to move, J to drop limbs, Space to throw limbs at enemies. 

Enjoy! Be sure to turn the volume up!

CORVUS was my final project for the Tisch Summer High School Game Design Program 2023. My partner (Adrian Odette) and I were given one week and two random verbs and tasked with creating a game with mechanics revolving around those verbs within the time constraint. The verbs given to us were “Dive” and “Pluck.” As a long-time fan of over-the-top gorey action games, I came up with the idea of creating a wave-based tower defense game, where the player controls a raven, diving down and plucking limbs off of enemies. In addition to the diving and plucking mechanics, the gameplay of CORVUS consists of flying around and throwing limbs in order to defeat enemies who slowly approach your tower.

 For the art style of CORVUS, I was heavily inspired by the artist Vaxo Lang. Lang’s artworks are often red, black, and white paintings of grotesque figures in pain. This art style speaks to me and I wanted to capture it with the art style and mechanics of CORVUS. I mechanically captured this style by putting a lot of “game juice” into both the tearing and throwing of limbs. For the tearing, I use a line rendering function to draw several tendons between the limb and where the limb was taken from. As the player pulls away, more and more tendons rip, creating more and more blood particles. Once all tendons are ripped, the camera quickly zooms out, and the player is granted more speed, giving the tearing of limbs more of an impact. In addition to using mechanics and visuals to capture the vibe of Lang’s works, I also put a lot of focus on the sounds used. I especially like the loud splat when limbs explode, It truly gives the feeling of impact and power to the player. 

For the music of CORVUS, I used a song by my brother’s friend, Bret Kaser. I chose the track “Lala Heartheart” because of its’ odd and sporadic vocals which really complimented the game feel and art style of CORVUS. 

CORVUS features seamless level looping, allowing the player to defend the tower from all angles at the same time. This was done by having all game objects (besides the player) draw themselves 9 different times, room height and room width distances away from the main room. This gives the illusion that the level is looping infinitely, when in actuality, you are only playing in one level, with only a recreation of the same level being displayed several times over. 

An issue that I ran into when integrating seamless level looping was finding the nearest enemy for the purpose of auto-targeting when throwing. I couldn’t just use the find_object_nearest function because there would be times when the enemy who appears to be the closest would not actually be the closest, due to the fact that he is simply just another rendering of an enemy game object, not an enemy game object itself. The way I solved this was by performing 9 checks, one for each rendered room. The first check looks for the nearest enemy for where the raven would be in each room. The second check takes the data gathered by the first check and uses it to see how far away each of the 9 targets are from said imaginary raven locations. After finding the smallest value out of the data set, the function then derives the angle at which the projectile will need to be shot, by checking the angle between the chosen raven and instance.

 Due to the one-week time constraint for this project, I was unable to Implement a few features I really think would have benefitted the gameplay. The main feature I think would really make the game pop would be a resource management system. In this system, each limb would have an effect when you fed it to the tower, as well as an effect when you threw it. For example, a leg would kill one enemy when thrown, and give you a damage upgrade if fed to the tower. A head would explode when thrown, creating an area effect, and would give a speed upgrade when fed to the tower. By having two ways to use each limb, the player would have more agency and the game would have more overall depth. #gamedev #devlog #indiedev #gamemaker #unity #gamedesign #gamedevelopment #gamedeveloper #gamedevelopment