Hello guys, I'm Rita Ribeiro and I'm finishing my degree in Multimedia Arts in the field of Interactive Environments in the Fine Arts Faculty of Lisbon University (Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa). This is the second time I participated in an edition of MOJO, having been part of the game "42" last year.

In this year's edition, my group is composed of João Moreira, Marta Mendes and Telma Barragão, who are students of the Instituto Superior Técnico of Lisbon.

"Hi! I'm João, a Computer Science student at IST. I love videogames, and since forever I wanted to be a GameDev. Now that I'm studying for that, I'm enjoying it even more than I was expecting! In addition, I really enjoy movies and everything tech, as such I'm always looking out for the next big thing."

-João Moreira

"Hey! I'm Marta Mendes and I'm a Computer Science and Engineering student at IST.
I am an aspiring video-game developer who loves dogs, pasta and mechanical keyboards.
Some of my favorite titles include: Luigi's Mansion, Uncharted 2, Kingdom Hearts and Animal Crossing."

-Marta Mendes

"Hi, my name is Telma Barragão, I'm 23 and I'm from Albufeira!
Currently I'm studying in Instituto Superior Técnico in my master degree in Computer Science Engineering (Games Development and Interaction Visualization as Major).
I'm a big lover of arts in general: music, dance, paint, draw and even cooking! Actually, i think that without all of those things I would go nuts, probably. That's why I use to sing, play guitar, piano and also ukelele, I cook every single day, I like to photoshop stuff and also teach dance to kids."

-Telma Barragão

Over the past few weeks, my group has been meeting so we can get to know each other better and talk about the future of our project. At first we were hesitant to create a game in 3D, 2D format, or even in pixel art. However after researching several examples to inspire us, we decided to build a platform game in 2D, in the genre of terror or suspense.

The concept of the game, in fact, is not exactly to transmit feelings of terror to the players, but rather trying to create an environment full of suspense, mystery and puzzles, with dark and abandoned scenarios.

Game Narrative:

The game begins with the notion that a child disappeared at the amusement park. After a long investigation without fruit, the park was closed. Years later, a group of 4 friends decided to go explore the park, now abandoned, in an attempt to find out what in fact passed to the missing child. When exploring the group enters the house of mirrors. Unexpectedly, monstrous arms come out of the mirrors to pull each children to different mirrors.

When they wake up separately, the friends communicate with each other by walkie-talkie. Trying to meet, one of them goes to meet the other. Upon arriving at the combined location, realize that everyone must be in different worlds.
With the aim of returning to the same dimension, friends have to explore together to find out how the disappearance of the child may be related to the strange event.

The game will probably be named "US". A name that relates to the four characters.

For now we are dealing with the technical parts of the game and the construction of the characters. I leave here some studies and notes that the group has already designed.

See you soon.

First storyboard game (first tests):

Part of the game, in which the characters are inside the haunted house, and something strange pulls them into mirrors

Characters to enter for the first time at the amusement park

March 30th 2018

Hello again,

Since the last publication, my group has met again, this time the meeting place was at Instituto Superior Técnico. Since then, we have decided how to get the demo of our game, as well as certain details of the assets and animations of the characters.

The demo of our game will take place in the part where the characters will find themselves inside a haunted house that belongs to the amusement park in which they are. This level will be divided into two parts, in which the player will have to use the skills of each character to be able to unravel the puzzles and find the hidden objects in order to allow him to move to the next room as well as the next level.

The scenarios of the house (which are already under construction) will be mysterious and haunting, full of hidden objects that will need the interaction of the player, and others that will interact alone. Some of these assets that I can already reveal to you are, for example, a broken flashlight, a pliers, a slingshot, and a mysterious big box.

So far, we have also assigned more personality to the characters. We have Wesley, who is a mainly athletic and agile boy, Piper, who is the girl of the group and besides being very agile she also has an excellent aim, we have Newt, who despite being the most fearful is also very smart and witty, and we have Chuck, who is a smart character and can handle with heavier objects. The characteristics of each character will be very important along the level.

Here are some gifs of our work:

See you later guys.

April 15th 2018

Welcome back,

For this third post I bring some news.

These last weeks we started to set the definitive game for the first part of our demo, so we can present it.

Since then I've started working on the scenarios as well as more assets that will be needed for the puzzles. In order to make the spaces of the game I was inspired by the tv series, Graviti Falls, which has the kind of illustration that I wanted to adapt. Then build the haunted house (chosen scene of the amusement park) in 3 divisions that after riding in unity will be transformed into one.

At this stage I build three more divisions that correspond to an air conduit, which in the background will be the passage to the next "phase" of the demo.

In this part of the level, the characters, although they are in the same space, will be in different "dimensions", which will be more visible for example in mirrors, or in the part in which the player will have to look for certain hidden assets. For the four different dimensions (dimensions corresponding to the number of characters) different characteristics will be presented to the player.

The second part of the level is still being built, but in the next post, I'll show you a bit of it, also showing a sample of the playable level.

See you soon.

April 30th 2018

Hello again,

Since the last post, my team encountered some problems while experiencing the game. In terms of mechanics the project is going well, but in the graphic parts we found that in assembling the complete scenarios some objects made are left with different and wrong proportions, some objects being blurred.

So since the last post I've been redoing some items, so that the same happens, still continuing to proceed to new stages. So far I have also begun to make the second part of the level, which consists of a "rest room" and another division that represents a basement of the house.

May 15th 2018

Hi guys!

Finally the time has come for MOJO!

Until the big day, these last weeks were very laborious and important, because it was the phase in which we had to completely review the art and mechanics of the game, and see what needed to be added or corrected.
Having finished making the scenarios all that would be used in the demo, in this final phase I focused more on correcting the general mistakes that my colleagues found in unity, as well as finishing making assets and correcting the animations. Making the animations was the most challenging part of creating the game, because despite having some references, the kind of illustration I chose to use made the process a bit complicated, because whenever I wanted to make a new move I had to redo the character from the point zero, never being able to use the previous models. But after a few tries, it turned out to be okay.

Aside from having fixed a few previous steps, I still had time to create a new character, a monster, who will be the final boss of the Demo.

After finishing everything in visual art, my colleagues also started building the rest of the game in unity, giving me time to focus on merchandising such as the logo, poster, stickers and t-shirts.
The first thing to do was the logo, where in its creation process I made several different versions, always trying to assimilate it to my type of illustration and to the main theme of the plot.
In the end, I showed all the hypotheses to my colleagues, and we all chose this:
The main element of the logo is not just the type of graphic, but also the colors. I chose the purple color as the background of the typography, because after some research on colors, I realized that this, in addition to symbolizing a colder color, is also commonly used in cartoons to portray ghostly things, such as haunted houses, scary places and mainly ghosts.

The second stage of merchandising was to make the poster, which after a few attempts, I ended up creating two versions. In both versions, the main characters mark the center of the poster, in which one scene represents the amusement park, and the other the haunted house.

Finally when MOJO Day arrived, my team and I can test the game, and see the reactions and opinions of the people in the room. Although the opinions have been diversified, in general everyone wanted to experiment, and try to pass the difficult puzzles that we created.

Unfortunately, although we did not have more time to improve the sample of our game (which we will still do in the future) working with this team and with this theme that I had never explored before (suspense / point and click), it was a challenging experience and gratifying.

Overall, this year's MOJO was fantastic. For in addition to having enjoyed creating this demo, I was able to finally try out the other team's; games, which was great too, because besides giving me future ideas for other projects related to games and animation, it was fun to live and see the experience of others.

I hope you enjoyed our work, see you!

Jump sprites:

Main poster

Secondery poster

FBAUL-IST GAMING 2018

US

March 30th 2018

April 15th 2018

April 30th 2018

May 15th 2018

May 30th 2018

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