Eldritch Confection is a 2D side-scroller, Eat'em up, where Cu, a young Eldritch God, must eat their way through a Candyland torn by civil war. Developed by a five-person team in a two-month, Pitch, Develop, Design, and Release period.
My Responsibilities
Game Designer: Created the Game loop, created game documentation, iterated on Level Design, and created all pitch documents for early development.
Combat Designer: Iterated on different attack types for Cu and our three enemy types. Designed different hazards with my other designer, and iterated on theming for our enemy types as well.
Audio Designer: Created all Audio assets in the game (except the Taco Bell ring). These range from sound effects for combat to our score as well.
UX Designer: I designed the entire User Experience found in the game. In our short period of development, I identified different needs and wants for our game, created surveys for our Alpha and Beta playtests, and integrated that feedback into our Gold version of Eldritch Confection.
Game Writer: I wrote all the dialogue found in the game. I also assisted with the Narrative Design of the game.
Video Editor: I edited the trailer found on our Itch.Io Page for the game.
Download and Play Right Now! On Itch.io!
Credits:
Producer, Ray Sarlatte
Game Writer, Quin Richards
Game Design, Quin Richards
Combat Design, Quin + Ray Sarlatte
UX, Quin Richards
Audio, Quin Richards
Music, Quin Richards
Video, Quin + Brendon Li
Publishing, Ray Sarlatte
Character Artist, Gwen Crookston
Asset Artist, Gwen Crookston
Environment Art, Ray Sarlatte
Designer, Ray Sarlatte
Engineer, Brendon Lee
Engineer, Andy Liu
From Left to Right: Andy Liu, Gwen Crookston, Quin Richards (me), Brendon Li, Ray Scarlatte
Game Documentation
A Title Card for our pitch deck I created
Mock UI Deck
Info slide deck for Eldritch Confection
Our Game Loop For Eldritch Confection
UX Design
Design Goals
1.) Create a fun, engaging, challenging Beat ‘em up experience.
2.) Create a combat loop that will leave players wanting more.
3.) Finish our game with our unique mechanics in a good place game-feel wise.
Design Troubles
1.) How can we make the Eating Mechanic specific to this game? How do we make it unique to our game?
2.) How can we get a basic sense of narrative within this game?
3.) How do we make our control scheme easy to access and understand on both keyboard and controller control schemes?
Design Resolutions
1.) To keep the fast-paced gameplay we wanted for each stage, we made the eating mechanic a two-frame animation that adds onto a “hunger” bar. The hunger bar is connected to Cu’s special abilities the player can use to defeat enemies more quickly.
2.) Give the player a linear progression through Eldritch Confection. Due to scope issues, we couldn’t fully flesh out a whole narrative for the game.
3.) Once we pivoted to a controller for our main control design scheme, we based our keyboard inputs off of Castle Crashers control scheme for mouse and keyboard. It made the most sense and pushed the player to play with a controller.
UX Documentation
A basic level layout for EC