Glade
Platform: Windows PC
Engine: Unity
Language: C#
Tools Used: Unity Development Kit, Aseprite, Ableton Live Lite, Clip Studio Paint
Duration: Ongoing (2023 --> 2024)
Team Size: 1
Project Design Goals:
- Construct a cohesive, polished product where all of its core pillars and features work towards one desired player experience.
- Build a game demo that clearly showcases the potential of a wider game concept and some of its core systems and structural elements.
Glade is a top-down adventure game about discovering a small woodland clearing, and all of the secrets hidden within. You play as a traveller who stumbles into the glade whilst on a longer journey of their own.
This game demo functions as a glimpse into a wider game, and is primarily concerned with capturing the core player experience and feel that a wider Glade game would hope to embody: one of respite, restoration, and curiosity.
Available Here: https://josiah-hendy.itch.io/glade
Glade was a third year university project. My aim when working on it was to test my ability to formulate cohesive player experiences through cumulative design and focusing every developmental process behind the game on one core feeling.
The interaction between development specialisms (i.e. art, audio, gameplay, etc.) has fascinated me and driven much of my personal work for quite a while, so Glade served as an exam of sorts where I could examine my own understanding of how best to utilise those differing pipelines.
For Glade, I wanted to try and capture a sense of tranquillity and calm in nature. I drew on my experiences exploring the woodlands of the Hebrides in Scotland from when I was a kid; my time spent adventuring on those islands evokes a nostalgic joy in me that I wanted to be able to share with others in the form of a game.
There is nothing overtly hazardous or dangerous in Glade, to frame the environment as a friend to the player, rather than something to overcome. The bulk of the gameplay revolves around solving environmental puzzles and clues, asking players to immerse themselves in the woodland scene and engage with its layout.
Player actions and narrative events concentrate on nature and getting in touch with it (i.e. the player collects pinecones, rests at a campfire, etc.). This means that, through gameplay, the restorative effects of nature are conveyed to the player by having them directly interact with it at every turn.
The 16-bit art style was drawn from SNES-era games such as Secret of Mana and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Using pixel art gives the game a deliberately retro feel that emphasises the desired nostalgic feel of the game.
Glade contains lots of small touches to help build the atmosphere that is so essential to its experience. A few examples include:
-
Light only filters through the lodge roof during the day.
-
The sound of the player's footsteps changes depending on the surface they or stood on.
-
The animation speed of fireflies increases or decreases if the player speeds up or slows down time with the lute.
-
Transitions between sections of the level were intentionally added to simulate the structure of older top-down adventure games.
With a game so fixated on building a specific atmosphere for its players, small details and polish such as those listed above are important to properly sell the player on the world.
I think I was successful in capturing my desired player experience in Glade, and am also pleased with some of my coding work under the hood, such as the 'time manager' system that controls the adaptive, highly customisable day-night cycle.
The submitted piece for university was a demo of the wider planned game, showcasing some elements of the wider game's first major area. I am considering continuing the project past university, moving on to the development the parts of the game that were planned during pre-production, but were not implemented during the module.
