Patchwork Beast
team
aspen games
3-person indie game team
role
creative director
game artist
UI developer
timeline
spring 2023
15 weeks
tools
godot engine
clip studio paint
Background
You are Ramis, an intrepid traveler journeying from home with a walking staff among your meager belongings. Mystified by the tales your elders spun, you venture towards the northern enchanted forest. A famed village called Mossglen lies at its entrance, a supposed crossroads between the human and forest spirit worlds. On your way, you stumble upon a forest spirit—but there's a strange metallic rust creeping up its body, and even stranger twitches in its gait.
Mossglen is nothing like the tales as well: the formerly vibrant settlement is now nothing but a ghost town. The remaining residents live in fear of this so-called Corrosion spreading from the forest center rotting the land and spirits from the inside out. Your staff, however, may be the key to healing it. With a promise to upkeep, you must journey deeper into the forest, uncover the origins of the Corrosion contaminating it, and heal afflicted forest spirits with your newfound powers. The beast awaits.
Concept
Patchwork Beast was an original story I wrote in high school for a 3D animated short film. I revived the narrative into a 2D top-down game for an interactive spin. It takes visual inspiration from Studio Ghibli and has steampunk/nature themes. Gameplay is low-stakes and more focused on the narrative than the action.
Art Direction
The protagonist, Ramis, is designed with a vibrant red cape to stand out against the blues and greens of his forested environment. Ramis dons a leaf hat and carries a glowing green staff to demonstrate his nature-healing powers.
His silhouette is simplified for ease of animation in the in-game sprites, with a more detailed version for the dialogue scenes.
Below: early concept sketches for gameplay and a Corroded enemy mob.
Game Design
Patchwork Beast is meant to have the fun and action of a dungeon crawler, but with a focus on healing rather than violence. As the player (Ramis) moves through the map, he meets various forest spirits who are being corroded by a mysterious evil force. The green spirits are visibly overtaken by Corrosion, a rusty red-brown miasma. Ramis must dodge the aggressive spirits while casting healing spells at them to remove the Corrosion entirely, upon which the spirits cease their hostility and peacefully disappear back into the forest.
The map contains the main village/home base, a section with deer spirits, a section with bear spirits, and lastly the clearing where the final boss--a beastly amalgamation of clanking, steaming metal parts belching polluted smoke--awaits.
Development
Patchwork Beast followed an agile/scrum development methodology. Our team completed weekly sprints and used Github for version control. The game was developed completely in Godot game engine.
Narrative: Patchwork Beast was relatively simple to rewrite from its original form as a short film. I created new character designs for the game.
Art: Because of the limited timeframe, we initially used a lot of placeholders for art assets. Everything in the final version of Patchwork Beast was hand-drawn. I would work incrementally and replace placeholders with the final sprites throughout the entire term of development.
Design: We followed standard practices for player interactions when designing game mechanics.
Development: Scenes were assigned to different people to avoid merge conflicts as much as possible.
Audio: Background music and sound effects were sourced royalty-free.