Project 3 - Iki and the Owl of Blight

Iki and the Owl of Blight

Project 3 - Platformer

iki and the Owl of Blight is a magical platformer about a forest spirit set out to save the forest from a dark infestation. For our third project we wanted a clear reference for both theme and gameplay, so we made a simplified version of Ori and the Blind Forest.

Below are my concepts for the three different levels. I wanted to create three very distinct moods with the same modular assets, and this is the result. 

Characters

I designed the main character, Iki, and the only other NPC, Aya. I wanted something that felt soft and cute but still looked like a forest spirit. I've always loved griffins so that's definitely one of the things that inspired the fox and owl fusion, but I think a lot of it came from Ori's design in Ori and The Blind Forest.

Enemies and Boss

For the enemies we needed something easy to animate as well as easy to place in Tiled. Because of their vague anatomy design the heads can be manipulated in code without any access to bones, which meant we could refocus our animation efforts on the player character. 

We had a very talanted animator on our team so I went all-out on creating an organic boss design, but unfortunately the boss got implemented so late in the project we did not have time to do much polishing. The boss gameplay I designed, where you pull out its tentacle things with the dash ability, worked out fine in-game but the boss itself was left extremely stiff-looking which was a shame. 

Pick-ups and UI

I also did all the menus and tutorials, the HUD and concepted the pickups, feathers and environmental hazards.