A Journey to School
A Journey to School is a game about two siblings a boy and a girl on a normal day trying to go to school in the terrible road conditions found in a representation of a Brazilian community. What makes this extra challenging is the fact that a brother is a disabled person and he needs a wheelchair to move around the city.
While I took many creative freedoms to design the environmental puzzles in the game. It is still a very good caricature representation of the many difficulties low-income people face every day in Brazil, plus all the art pieces in the game aimed to be fully loyal representations of everyday aspects of Brazil.
The game was awarded the prize “A challenge worth facing” during Gamerella global jam 2021.
Design
All the levels have the same object bringing both characters to the end of a level.
To do this the player can switch the control of the characters at any moment.
Players can interact with objects such as elevators and boxes in a physics-based environment. As an example, the young brother can control the elevators for the sister to reach areas needed to progress, or the sister can place boxes to help her disabled brother move around the map.
Production
The development of the game was short but went smoothly. Since I mostly with a programmer friend, I organized the project backlog utilizing a Trello board and defined due dates and priorities with my partner. While none of us have the talent of character and environmental artists I reached out to friends that had that talent to work as external asset providers in the game.
I managed my time to work with both the external developers and my partner to guarantee the assets created were in brand with the game We were developing. Plus
I still found time to design each level of the game.
In the end, the game was delivered in time for the global jam.
Screen Shots
