The reason I have this included in my portfolio is because I feel really proud of it. I made everything and while Stencyl does blueprint type of drag and drop coding I still came up with all the logic. I even made the music and sound effects, which unfortunately are not in the game play video. Take a look below to see the process of the game from mood board and sketches to completed art. If you will notice, my branding before it was a robot in a dino suit named Audasaurus Rex was Omnimoose Games. I ended up doing some research and found another person was using Omnimoose so I didn't feel comfortable using it myself.
Penguin Panic opens and you see a cute little egg. You click it and it hatches into an adorably fuzzy baby penguin. This is when you, the player, take control of the precious fuzzy penguin and run for your life! As you run you notice that the ice begins to crack. You now have jump to reach higher ground. One wrong jump and you end up a tasty snack for the leopard seal behind you.
The farther you go the worse the cracks get. You now have to jump from iceberg to iceberg with the leopard seal still hot on your heels. You notice a particularly high ledge. Maybe you can even jump while already in the air. You can feel your heart beating like crazy. Your wings flap uselessly at your sides. You never asked for any of this. You were content to stay in your safe little egg. So far your life has been nothing but panic and fear. The only thing keeping you going are the fish. You don’t know why they are out of the water and directly in your path but you don’t question it. You just enjoy their delicious taste.
A squawk sounds above you and down swoops a skua bird. You slide along the ice to try to avoid being lunch. You are now trying jump ledges, jump icebergs, and dodge crazy birds. You don’t know how much farther your short little legs can take you. That’s when it happens: you jump too soon and you miss the ledge of the iceberg. The jaws of the death wrap around you like a pain blanket and you now know how those tasty fish feel.
Your vision fades from red to black and the screen asks you to input your name and date for the high score board. You are no longer that poor baby penguin. You type in your name and the score board shows you the top ten distances ran and a tally for the most fish eaten. A button takes you back to the home screen where a penguin egg shakes invitingly. Do you click the egg? Do you take the chance that you can escape the jaws of a predator?
For this project we started with a mood board. Originally I was going to have an orca and a leopard seal in the game. In the end I decided on a leopard seal that can't actually get to you but gives the player something to panic about and a swooping skua bird which likes to eat baby penguins.
Here are my first sketches of the the penguins and the enemies. If you notice the penguin in the very center is the design I went with and the bottom bird is what I went with. The only thing that changed about the seal is the orientation. Below is my thought process for how the icebergs would look like.
These are animations for the penguin in various states and it's enemies.
These images are the rest of the assets. The waves show different bits of the animation. The icebergs are the actual platforms the player jumps on. I ended up making another style of iceberg to use for parallax and also to give the player some indication of how far they have gone.
Here are various screenshots from the game.
Animated buttons
Animated buttons
Nice and flat beginning
Nice and flat beginning
Sometimes there is no escape.
Sometimes there is no escape.
You can hop onto the birds.
You can hop onto the birds.
Blood rage!
Blood rage!
Random death quote each death.
Random death quote each death.
Saves the high scores!
Saves the high scores!
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