Art of Rescue
About
Art of Rescue is a game built in Flash by Team Femtastic Four, an all-girls game design group. The team consisted of Raschel Mead, Erica Penk, Katie Stokes, and myself. Our goal was to create an educational game prototype aimed at middle and high school art history students. We tried to do this through passive learning - players learn artist's styles by exploring fun levels made up of the artist's various famous elements (ie Monet's lily pads and Dali's melting clocks).
The game follows Genevieve, an artist who must venture into paintings to rescue artists that have been trapped within by an evil wizard. She uses her magic paintbrush to freeze cursed elements that move throughout the canvas. The frozen enemies become platforms that allow her to continue forward on her rescue mission.
For this prototype, our team created two full levels as well as cutscenes for the game intro and information about the artists. The two levels were modeled after Monet and Dali, two artists we felt would exemplify our game mechanics and educational message.
Contributions
Programming
As lead programmer, I did a large portion of the programming. This largely consisted creating the mechanics - movement, collision, shooting, and enemy attributes. In addition, I also added the sprites and art to the game, made XML level importing (from a visual level editor), and created game flow (ordering the cutscenes and levels).
Design
Game design for this project was a collaborative process split between all group members that began with the identification of the target demographic (a requirement for the project) and the creation of the game idea, mechanics, plot, and art style. The design process continued as a full-group activity with pen-and-paper prototypes, playtesting, and UI design. The group used iterative design to refine the game mechanics, art and UI between playtests.