Fancy Mansion: a change of setting
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In Introduction to Game Development, students are to select a game concept created by another group in the previous course, and turn it into a fully playable game. Our group selected Fancy Mansion, a concept developed by classmates for a stealth game aimed at a younger audience.
Click to expand We spent about sixteen hours the first week discussing the game’s design, gameplay, and setting. While of course preserving the core mechanics and concept of the game based on Group 15’s concept document, as per assignment criteria, our group still wished to implement some changes in order to inject our own style and personal touches. We wanted to work with a meaningful light-radius to really keep the player on edge – after all, the maximum playthrough time for this game was assigned as 15 minutes, so we needed to pack a punch quickly. A smallish light radius around the player and utter darkness beyond we felt would help quickly establish several of Group 15’s desired aesthetics for the game: orientational cluelessness, the everpresent risk of death, a sense of inferiority, and the desire to escape a frightening situation. At the same time, one of our artists felt the game was skewing a bit too mature: it was too be aimed at a younger audience, and while gametesting our prototype, the utter darkness, the sound of footsteps and ponderous tone was overall TOO SPOOKY. So we brainstormed. We decided the game’s tone would decrease in severity if the characters weren’t modern-day humans, or if the setting was adjusted to something a bit lighter. We had our artists come up with variations on the player character and enemy, Otto von Fancy. What they came up with will BLOW YOUR MIND no just kidding but it was pretty cool, though.
[MORE IMAGES INC] While I absolutely loved the idea of a Dracula-esque mansion owner, a fellow programmer had a brainwave while having a look at Oscar’s sketch of a raccoon – what if it was a steampunk mansion? A steampunk mansion with anthropomorphic animals? The cartoonish anthropomorphism would serve to help skew the game’s setting back down to a younger audience, and the steampunk – well. Steampunk’s just awesome, ok. Rather than a collector of archaic valuables, we re-imagined Otto von Fancy as an inventor, in order to reflect and better showcase the steampunk setting.
We were quite pleased with this new aesthetic direction – however, two examiners pointed out the similarities between our re-imagined setting Sly Cooper – at least as far as the choice of a tortoise and raccoon were concerned. While the similarity was unintentional, we decided to modify our main character to a fox: this way it would be less taxing on the artists, who had begun work on animation, as the basic silhouette would be similar enough to that of a raccoon, and a fox still evokes the image of a cunning, stealthy creature. We decided to keep our envisioning of Otto as a tortoise, but bulk him out with a stolid, lumbering stance, and body modifications such as steam pipes in his shell to give visual queues to the player that he was an inventor of sorts. Below is an in-game screenshot featuring our light radius and glow-in-the-dark boomerang mid-throw, which can be used to illuminate the path around the player: 
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