Curing Corruption

Play as a wandering apothecary healing and curing the sick.

Play as a traveling apothecary in a magical fantasy world full of mysterious illnesses. Investigate and identify the diseases, explore diverse locations to find ingredients, and craft potions to cure the patients and save the day.

World Design

The level design here was to showcase the forest to explore, the mountains to the south, and the river that runs next to the village. The forest and village are connected by a bridge. To tell the story of the world, the writer of the game and I worked together to create a forest that feels more like an unexplored forest because the story has the villagers not exploring it as much.

Even more so, different boulders, rocks, and more are in the forest and near the village. The denser trees showcase the more “magical” side of the forest. Within the forest are the roaming deer in which the ginger roots fall from their antlers when the deer get to the Scadu Trees, special trees significant in the world. Because they house great magical power, a particle VFX was implemented to showcase that.

My personal belief is that a world should not only reflect engaging gameplay, but also tell the story of the world.

The easy to access forest is driven by a very easy way to access it. Furthermore, the roads were added as a way to make sense of the placement of each house. The roads were removed in the finalized version.

Village Level Design

The path leading to the caves tells the story of the culture of this village to use stone and wood in their work and architecture. Here, it will be vital and imperative to add features like statues, monuments, and more.

Emulating a roman town with a forum, there is a large space next to the municipal building/mayor’s house. This place would be populated for the shops, main houses, and more.

Exploration

  • Explore the Open World

  • Explore the dark caves

    Explore the dark caves

  • Craft your potions in your lab

  • Interact with a small, quiet village

Dialogue Implementation

In implementation, there will be dialogue choices that branch out to different outcomes. The image shows the dialogue options. Dialogue is an excellent way to tell the player stakes, tell about the world, and orient them to a new setting. Here, input is disabled except for the mouse which will select an option. That option will progress the dialogue and potentially give different outcomes.

Places to expand here would be actual consequences like NPC attitude towards the player, information to give the player like lore, playable options, and more. The expansion can also be more NPCs and their interaction with each other can affect attitude of the NPC towards the player. This will make the world feel more alive and real.

Dialogue Planning

This is the dialogue tree with the mayor in the most base form. More dialogues are addable and easily implemented in the code. This dialogues here are meant to be a base outline for the game and the quest progression must follow this. Additional edits can be made for more personality for each character, but this will be the most of it.

User Interface Designs

The goal here was to make the player think and choose the correct option instead of just mindlessly following a recepie book. This creative decision was taken to keep the player engaged, thinking, and analyzing their actions. By creating symbols based off a language I had already created, there was an implicit understanding within the language and art style itself.

The sickness card was created to keep that engagement while implementing several NPCs that are sick. The open journal version really only works for a singular person being sick, which made sense as during the development of the game, for ease and demonstration of the project, only one sickness card/journal was needed.

The descriptions of the ingredients are there to showcase an important part of the gameplay as well: Exploration. The intricate crafting system must go along with the gathering methods. Hence, gathering mushrooms means that the light switch must be turned off as a way to solve the mystery of how they are so difficult to pull from the ground. In the same vein, the mushroom was described to being so strong becasue of something nearby. This would be attributed to the magical crystals that form next to the mushrooms.

In this way, we can give hints to the player on where to find ingredients, how to gather the ingredients, and what the ingredients solve.

Next

Emergence from the Grave