NARWHAL | 2012


  • Exploration Game
  • Find your way through an underwater Labyrinth
  • Avoid obstacles, kill enemies, break barriers, and swim with the currents
  • Boost and use your Narwhal Horn to explore
  • Team Responsibilities: Produced, Designed All Levels, created marketing materials
  • Team size five, Sophomore Year
Narwhal is a top down exploration game about a Narwhal exploring, for some reason, a tropical sea environment.  On the way he'll have to deal with strong sea currents, prickly enemies and stray obstacles.  While the goal of the game may be to collect every hidden pearl, many players enjoy riding the currents and popping bubbles with their horn.

Narwhal was developed entirely from scratch in C++.  Copyright DigiPen USA Corporation, 2012.  All rights reserved.

Responsibilities:

-Level creation and design
-Particles
-Scheduling Milestones
-Weekly production reports
-Game Progress documentation
-Game presentations

What went right:

  • We built a brand new C++ engine and game from scratch in half the time other teams had to complete the project
  • This was our first year successfully working with an artist and sound designer to create a finished product, and it went perfectly
  • Narwhal was what spearheaded my interest in game production.  It was an opportunity for me to learn and use a lot of really cool production tools.

What went wrong:

  • Due to starting from scratch, the game wasn't playtested nearly as often as it should have been.  As a result it's kind of boring and the controls can feel a little wonky at times.

What I learned:

  • How to organize a team project using some basic production methodologies
  • How to work with XML parsing
  • Level design: how to guide a player through a semi-linear space

GDD:
You can download Narwhal's executable and GDD here.  It should take about 10 minutes max to play.
narwhal_setup.exe
File Size: 19721 kb
File Type: exe
Download File
250_narwhal_gdd.odt
File Size: 3295 kb
File Type: odt
Download File