The NYU Game Center Showcase 2024
˚✦★⋆. ࿐࿔ .˚ *✦ ˚.˚ .✶ -͟͟͞☆
⟢Thesis
⟢Capstone
⟢Studio II
⟢Major Studio
⟢Mosaic
Gismonda
⊹ ࣪.⋆~⊹₊⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆✩࿐
For Major Studio: Spring
An Art Nouveau boss fighting experience inspired by Alphonse Mucha's Gismonda (1894). Show the goddess what you can do with your newfound strength!
Interview:
✧In one or two sentences, what is your game about?
An Art Nouveau historical Greek-themed boss fighting game. Play as Gismonda, the duchess blessed by light, and battle vicious foes!
✧What was the inspiration of the game? What made your team decide to make this game specifically?
As a Major Studio Spring project, we were assigned a proof of concept that was a simple boss fight based on the 1894 play Gismonda (and the poster by Alphonse Mucha that was commissioned for said play). We decided to expand on this straightforwardly, conceptualizing a series of 1-5 narrative boss fights that Gismonda could go through that all drew from the narrative of the original play. The artstyle, setting, choice of boss, and Gismonda's design are all inspired by the play and its promotional poster. The narrative content we planned referenced the play even more explicitly, though most of this had to be cut by the end.
✧Were there difficult moments when developing the game? What led to those difficult moments? What did you learn from it?
We really didn't realize how long a single decent boss fight would take to get going, so we massively overscoped at the beginning and had to repeatedly compensate for that throughout development. A lot of things got cut or modified during the process, which I think affected a lot of people's motivation to work on the game. We ultimately had to focus on refining the small things and adding nice touches like juice or particles where we could. We had an especially difficult moment about 3/5 into the semester where our combat systems felt massively behind the point they should be at. It was pretty depressing to work through; we had to hard focus and rigorously prioritize everything for a couple weeks to get the game to a more playable state. It kind of worked, but was pretty taxing. Really goes to show how important maintaining priorities early on is.
✧Were there darlings that you had to kill? What were they? Why was the decision made to remove them from the project, and what were the reasons that you like the darling so much?
We were really attached to the idea of using multiple boss fights (at least 2 of them) to form a narrative, but narrative ended up being what we cut most for time. We also wanted to include a training area that'd feature a mini-cutscene, as well as a lot more abilities for Gismonda to load into her rings, but as you can see we finished with a pretty minimal intro area and only two ring abilities. The narrative boss fighting game we conceptualized basically got chopped down into a single Art Nouveau-inspired boss fight. The majority of the cool thematic stuff we wanted to pull off didn't end up making it in, but the rescoping was necessary so we could have a finished boss fight at all. In hindsight, I think a lot of the things we wanted to add were just because we thought it'd be cool or would make the game feel unique. And then the longer people held onto the idea, the more attached they got. Probably lessons to be learned there about what darlings to get attached to in the first place.
✧Talk about your teammates! What was everyone’s role?
I'm Wei (person writing the answers), I'm the project manager and producer. I also did tuning and made some art and UI assets, as well as the title screen assets. The main artists were Dade, who did character, texture, and background art; and Yuki, who did animation, boss and background art, VFX, some UI, some tech art, and the logo. All three of us also made concept art. Ahmed, Annabeth, and Ben did the main programming, with the work settling into Ahmed doing boss programming, Annabeth doing systems and UI, and Ben doing character, skill, and juice programming, as well as controller support. Bob did all the sound and the majority of the UI. And finally, Xu did some design and programming. Most of us contributed to the fight design. Annabeth and I also worked on narrative stuff early on before it was cut.
play this game on itch.io
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