Angstrom Post Mortem – Making of

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About me

I like playing video games since I was a small kid. But unfortunately my experience with game design is very limited. I am an Automation Engineer and currently I’m working with R&D of Robot Behavior for Human Interaction.

Working with robots can be very fun and it requires lots of programming, AI/behaviors, physics simulations, Kinematics&Dynamics, etc. Interestingly, these skills intersect pretty well with what it takes to make a game.

A few years ago “doing a game by yourself from scratch in 48hrs” would sound insane to me. But after being an Engineering Master student in Taiwan, I have to say that I’m no stranger to crazy hard assignments with stupidly short deadlines, and of course unreasonably high quality standards (welcome to Asia!).

Theme

My interpretation of the “Tiny World” theme is that the game happens in the microscopic world, in the scale of bacteria and protozoa. I saw that many people interpreted the theme more literally, as an actual small planet.

Story

The story goes like this: a time travel experiment goes wrong and then the protagonists are miniaturized and have to survive the tiny world.

Recently I’ve been watching Steins;Gate, it’s an anime series about paradoxes and time travel. So on this competition I wanted to do something time travel related. Unfortunately, the “Tiny World” theme doesn’t match so well with time travel. Anyway, I somehow stubbornly included it to the story.

To tell the truth, I have little experience with storytelling and character development, so I decided not to put much time on that.

Genre

In this competition the choice of the game genre is of course the most fundamental. For this game I chose the Platformer genre.

I live in a paradox. I’m half artist, half engineer. Usually these halfs conflict each other, but in game design they add up pretty well. I can write programs in a reasonably high speed, but I have to say that I’m no tiger-paw programmer. With this in mind and considering the theme, I chose the platformer game style.In this kind of game, the programming part is not very demanding and you cam make direct and easy use of the Engine’s physics simulation. Moreover, it’s easy to integrate drawings and paintings to the game. Not to mention that the art stands out a lot in this kind of game.

Characters

Protagonist – He is a male scientist that was caught up in this miniaturizement situation and tries to find a way out of it.

Support character – Platforming games are usually a little lonely in my opinion. So I decided to add an NPC to play along with the main character.

Other characters – There are two other characters that make a brief appearance in the game intro. I didn’t want to waste time on them, so I simply based them on the original two characters.