Dogma was my team’s thesis project, the product of two semesters of work and more than a few lessons learned. It’s a 2D Metroidvania where the player, in the role of Ashwin, must explore a world of dreams, collecting the powers of the family she lost and fighting the darkness that took them.
13 years ago, the heroes failed; only the child they left behind remembers them enough to mourn. Now through her dreams, she hears their call, “Find us, remember us, we wait in the dark.”
My Roles:
Game Designer
Level Designer
Narrative Designer
Writer
The game we planned in September was a product of overconfidence; we realized this in October. Scaling back massively was necessary, but the scaled-down version, the first area of the original plan, felt odd and hollow. The story hardly started, and of the four powers, three of which had already been made, only one could be unlocked.
Motivation died when we were working on this version until one evening, we broke down and realized none of us liked the product we were making.
So again, we changed our plan, not to scale up or down, but rather to shift sideways; enter the dreamscape. By making it a dreamscape, a call to adventure, we didn’t need the NPCs other than the one we had already made as a guide, and by scraping any semblance of the original level, we were able to bring back all of the mechanics and enemies we had made and set aside.
Much of the story had been scraped in the first rescope, and there was no space for it in its original form, but by using the remaining NPC, Lore, as a guide and by scattering optional pickups in the form of journal entries from the cut characters we were able to return the key elements and feel of the story.
