Orb Odyssey

Overview

Tale of Umbris is an action platformer where you play as Umbris, a member of the Noctari clan in ancient Egypt. Feuding with the rival Solauda tribe, you've been entrusted to infiltrate their temple to retrieve a mystical artefact which was stolen millenia ago, which could change the tide of the war. You need to avoid patrolling guards and hidden traps that lie ahead of you by blending into the shadows and timing your movements to slide and jump over perilous traps. 

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Tale of Umbris was one of the first big multi-disciplinary project I collaborated on for my first year of University. We were given a prompt for the project from the year ahead of us about what kind of genre the game would be and features that they would like to see but were given creative freedom to make changes.

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Roles and Responsibilities

My role on this project was originally a programmer, but I ended up being more of a generalist due to some people dropping out. In terms of design, one of the things I was involved in was on the world design and lore of the game with the character of Umbris, his abilities. and his role in the story. The prompt was an Aztec tribe, however we decided to go with an Egyptian theme due to us being more knowledgeable about Egyptian mythology and we had more ideas about how to incorporate this into the enemy and level design.

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I worked alongside a fellow designer to design the level that the player would play through. We wanted it to have a pyramid structure due to the sense of progression of steadily making your way up from the bottom to the pinnacle. Likewise, we knew that we wanted to include traps like spike pits, swinging axes, and rolling boulders, so we designed the environment to have layers where the player moved through different "sets" of traps alternating left and right as they progressed up the temple.

 

Furthermore, I helped design the game's UI and produced the art used for the Main Menu and the Victory screen. I wanted to use a geometric style with dark purple colours to contrast against the bright moon. This was to get across the theme of being a Noctari warrior using the timing of the full moon to make his approach, almost as if this is the one and only opportunity that they were going to get.

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Challenges

Losing members of the team during development meant that we had to repriortise tasks and have people take on other roles. 

 

Luckily the team and I were willing to step up to the challenge and use our skillset to cover as much as possible. We had to rescope the game which unfortunately meant cutting out features like the combat and the proposed shadow abilities (like hiding in areas of darkness to avoid patrols and extinguishing light sources temporarily). 

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Outcome

We managed to complete the game's level with a great game loop of dodging enemies and traps as well as having precise platforming sections. We did a retrospective about the experience and managed to score great on that. I would like to maybe revisit this project at some point to flesh out more of the gameplay and polish as this was an earlier project which could benefit with the knowledge and skills I have gained since.