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Adventure of Elroy the Unipus

Elroy lost seven of his tentacles!  Now he must decide who will help him on his quest for revenge!
On his adventure, Elroy encounters 3 bosses, each of which is very unique and interesting. Most players enjoy the boss fights very much and say they are very memorable.

Memorable, epic, intense boss fights!

Mindy, a snail that could fall in love with Elroy, tells Elroy to not eat any crabs. However, eating crabs is very helpful gameplay-wise. This disconnect of gameplay and story is on purpose to test if the story of the game affects a player's actions.

Characters tell Elroy to do things that make the game harder.

There are several types of enemies and objects the player can interact with. Each is unique and presents a different type of puzzle using the same mechanics. Also in this image, you can see that Elroy can eat fish to grow his tentacles back.

Face many enemies! Solve multiple Puzzles!

Video:

Description:

  • Quirky adventure/maze game that I created myself (with the help of one artist that did a few graphics) in 15 weeks
  • I created it as an experiment to see how story affects how players’ actions
    • Throughout the game, Elroy is pulled in three opposite directions from different non-playable characters on what he should be doing
      • General Fishkins wants him to grow back to full health so he can rejoin the army
      • Mindy, a snail that “loves” him, tells him to stay with one tentacle due to how cute it makes him
      • Elroy himself would like to eat crabs, which make him temporarily invincible, but all the other characters tell him not to<
      • What will influence you the most: fitting in, love, or doing things for yourself?
    • Some don’t care about the story and just do things that will get them through the challenges
    • Most actually set harder challenges for themselves just to make a certain character in the game happier
  • The story involves Elroy having seven of his tentacles being bitten off by a giant Tiger Shark leaving him as a weak Unipus
  • About an hour or of fun interesting gameplay
    • Navigating Elroy around obstacles and fighting enemies
    • Puzzle solving
    • Three unique and “epic” boss fights

Goal:

  • Create a full game on my own in a semester while having 4 other classes
  • Create a game that can experiment with how the storyline of a game affects the player’s actions
  • Have the game be as long as possible and a very memorable game

Outcome:

  • Game is completed except for a few bugs and the dialog could use some fixing up
  • Players are most definitely affected by the storyline, some more than others
  • The game takes about 45 minutes to beat and has many memorable characters and fights in it

My Roles:

  • Creator

Team Size:

  • 1 Creator
  • 1 Junior Artist

Released:

  • 4/30/09

Documentation: