Lepidoptera
This project was one of the most interesting I have ever worked on. I was a producer, designer and programmer for this game. The purpose of this game was to have the player experience loneliness and it was made for one of my classes (Alternative Game Design). I worked in a team of 5 people to come up with a game in 3 months. What was different than my other projects is that I took a very long time adjusting the design elements in this game to pass the message I wanted. after a lot of playtesting the game was finished if great feedback from the people that played and some people felt different feelings about the game which was amazing to see the different perspectives every person had while playing Lepidoptera.
In this game, the player controls a butterfly in a quest to find her friends that are facing different problems, while in this journey you will notice that not always you can save them by yourself.
Here is a summary of everything that I did in this project.
Design
The idea behind the Red Butterfly is that she is feeling so lonely that her color is now black and white and every time the player tries to reach her she goes away and “creates” this wall around her to symbolize the barriers people create. As the player keeps trying to reach her not only the sound I chose shows the player that your butterfly is breaking into the walls, but also, the red butterfly starts to recover her color, until the end when you finally reach her and she joins your journey.
As I mentioned before sometimes you can not save your friends by yourself and you need help. To represent this idea in the game I decided to give the player full freedom to explore each area of the game from the beginning, but the player will only succeed in case you have the right butterfly with you. If the player goes to the green area before getting the Red butterfly the only thing in the room is an ocean of green butterflies with a lot of “flapping” noises.
If the player has the Red Butterfly and goes to the Green area with the red butterfly the first thing to notice is that the “flapping” noise doesn’t exist anymore, and the butterflies are avoiding the player. Going further it is possible to see another green butterfly flying in a different pattern from the other and finally joins you. The designing idea behind this was to show that sometimes your friend is lost in many figurative ways and this friend of yours needs your help to find the way back. So it made sense to have this butterfly be in the middle of a lot of other butterflies and you have the power to clear the way.
In case the player does not have both the green and red Butterfly it will be not possible to save the blue friend. The idea was to represent that the Blue Butterfly is being negative about himself and every time the player tries to reach it these negative thoughts will make the player leave the area. I wanted to give the impression that sometimes your negative thoughts can hurt other people, so that is why you have the blue butterfly being surrounded by other blue butterflies, and the noise that they make when attacking you is very aggressive to reinforce this idea.
In case the player does have both the red and the green butterflies then it is finally possible to make the bad thoughts go away and rescue the needed friend.
Lastly, the Yellow butterfly is required to have all the other Butterflies with you to complete it. The idea of this butterfly is to show that not always loneliness is caused by some serious problem and sometimes the only thing you need is your friends to be happy again. That is why I decided to make the Yellow butterfly create imaginary friends that dance with him while his friends are not in there yet.
After the player gathered all the friends, it is possible to save the yellow butterfly. After the player gets there each friend starts getting into the imaginary friend place, until you finally join them and live happily after. It is important to note that the sound used in this part is to show the player that something good is about to happen.
Production
My experience as a producer for this game was very interesting because it first started trying to connect with people in my classroom to see who was willing to participate in a game with Loneliness being the theme. After finding the group it was time to organize the Trello board and discuss the directions we were going with the game. It took a lot of team meetings to settle the exact directions this game took. I remembered in one of the meetings two team members were arguing about the art style while one wanted to have a cartoony game the other suggested pixel art. I am not an artist, but that time was necessary to sit down and talk with the whole team about the quantity of time we had which was not a lot, and the number of people in the team which was also short. After having this talk we all concluded that pixel art would be the ideal art for this game. What was hard for me as far as team management in this project was finding the middle term between what was good for the game and what my teammates wanted. Discussing that in meetings and having a lot of playtesting was essential to reach this balance. Another good example was the way we nailed down the behavior of the other butterflies to represent the message we wanted. I had to make in numerous playtests reports to finally start finding what was the best idea for each scenario.
Sound Effects
Background Music
Ambient Sound
Red
Green
Blue
Yellow
Screen Shots
