Personal Project
Unity / Blender / Photoshop
6 weeks, Still in development
"Bobo Rush" is a third-person perspective game, players will play a roadside weed named Bobo.
Although it is difficult for them to survive as small grasses away from the soil, together they will find a place to land in the city and embark on an adventure.
Team
Tools
Duration
About
01
Game Demo
* The game has sound effect, please open the sound :)
02
Overview
World-building Concept
The world-building concept of "Bobo Rush" is based on the AE animation I drew and made before. It tells the story of the weed Bobo left her childhood growth of the roadside, through the adventure, and finally reached the dream of the botanical garden.
*Click the arrow to check out the story board.
* You could check the animation here:
Bobo is a weed that grows alongside a street. She lives with her friends who are also weeds. But unlike her friends, she has a flower on her head.
Bobo loves playing with her friends every day. They dance, sings songs, and do all kinds of stupid stuff. She is quite happy with her life. However, sometime she feels like she doesn’t belong here.
But somehow, Bobo wasn’t that sad. She left her flower at the bonatic garden, and returned back home. Now She is living happily with her friends again.
Bobo is a weed that grows alongside a street. She lives with her friends who are also weeds. But unlike her friends, she has a flower on her head.
Gameplay
I really like this story, in particular, the characteristics of Bobo's role as a plant. So, using the plant characteristics as a starting point, I built the basic gameplay of this game: the character cannot leave the soil for too long. Based on this, more derivative gameplay can be developed. For example, players can create soil and hide in soil, they could use other plants that create aerial landing sites.
The game demo shows the first level of the game, which is also the beginning tutorial level of the game.
03
Process & Iteration
Art: Character Design & Modelling
I create the character model and rig all the animations inside the blender, and import them into Unity. The materials are created inside Unity with the toon shader rendering pipeline.
*Pipelime from Unity Store: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/flat-kit-toon-shading-and-water-143368
Programming: States Machine
I create my own version of states machine for this projects, because Bobo has a lot of states. The states machine is really useful for long term development, because I will add other functions or states to Bobo. It could also be used to NPCs.
* My States Machine Logic: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOi3-ZNM=/?share_link_id=373455210855
* The state machine uses scriptable object s
Player Test
I tested the "Bobo Rush" on ITP Spring show 2022. Thorugh the test, I discovered these problems and improved some of them in the newest version:
-
Wither time makes players feel confused.
In the first version, Bobo will start wither when it leave the soil and immediately resurrects from the checking point when the time is up. But "immediately" will make players feel confused.
The reasons for confusion are as follows:
- The progress of reading seconds is shown by Bobo's leaves. The player does not know at what color Bobo's leaves die, so there is no mental preconception. Some players don't even have a way to discover the rule that the leaves show the progress of reading seconds by themselves.
Solution: Add UI / text hints
-The reaction of some players after respawning is: "What just happened? " Immediately respawning may not allow players to realize that they died. Could refer to other games and add a loading page after death.
Solution: Add died / restart animation
-New gameplay: Add a limit on the number of lives. Should I add a life count limit? Adding this feature would mean adding a new way to "gain extra lives" to the game.
Solution: Add special coins that could restore Bobo's health
*Before
*After
-
Topographical guidance issues
Most players currently do not find the garden on their own! Even after the addition of guided conversations!
Reasons analysis:
- Players do not read long sections of text. Adding a quest system and setting up strong hints may solve the problem.
- Path guidance is not obvious, players have difficulty identifying the soil in the city. How to limit the player to move in the world with large offsets, but still create a sense of exploration ?
Solution: I add a coins system to guide players' routes. Coins as a kind of reward could make players move as I design, but still keep the sense of exploration, because they could choose to leave the coins and find their way.
- Map is hard to recognize
Solution: Make the maps interactable, and Bobo do not wither when players read the map.
*Before
*After
-
Perspective issues
For now, players could use the mouse to turn the perspective 360 degrees, does it need to change to:
- Fixed perspective, cases: Little Nightmare, Kirby.
- Or lock a certain perspective, giving players a certain degree of freedom.
During test, many players do not rotate their perspective at a large angle, and some of them do not even move the mouse.
What is the meaning of full perspective?
Solution: After I continue the development, I find out the function of full perspective. At the second level, the stealth game play will be introduced, Bobo need to hide in the soil, and avoid human. The full perspective could help players to observe environment.
04
Future Dev
-
Reinforced "soil" material
The current recognition of soils is still a bit low, due to the lack of stratification of the gray scale of the environment. Take “Untitled Goose Game” as an example, you can see that the gray scale of the protagonist goose is the brightest. Perhaps the grayscale of the environment buildings can be reduced to highlight the soil.
* Gray scale of the protagonist goose is the brightest
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Continue to develop game play
I already finished the stealth state, but animation still need to optimization.
You could see my dev process on my Ins: https://www.instagram.com/lea_artworks/
