Daydreamer

Entrant 2015


CREATOR
Roland Womack

Description

Roland Studios is an independent video game developer currently working on a 2d Platformer entitled "Daydreamer." The story is a little ambiguous to explain, but here goes. To sum up, it's about a young girl, Olivia, waking up in a post-apocalyptic era.

Olivia awakens from a human preservation chamber on her home planet which was taken over by aliens thousands of years ago. She wakes up to find a barren world stripped of its resources in the midst of civil war. The world has become over-populated by its new alien inhabitants. As a result, the aliens have turned against the gods that they had once served. The world is in shambles from radioactive war, genetically mutated aliens, and giant bugs.

Meanwhile, as the world struggles, Olivia is in a deep sleep. She has a dream in which she is confronted by one of the aliens who tells her that she must seek out her brother. Soon after she awakens, the game begins. –Oh yeah, and she also has super psychic powers!

The game plays like a conventional side scrolling shooter, greatly inspired by Megaman and older Treasure Games, i.e. Gun-star Heroes/Alien Soldiers, from the 16 bit era. Aside from platforming and shooting, the game also has "Spirit Animals" support character mercenaries that give the player a tactical edge amongst all the chaos. The game is very Boss Focused, although it includes a vast interconnected world for exploration, dare I say Metroidmania.

The look of the game is primarily pre-rendered cgi sprites. Since the dawn of the N64, the law of the land has always been "everything 3d". Everything had to be "a connected all in one immersive experience," a common buzzword that has been used to death. I miss games that were just an "awesome experience". I have always admired the graphical fidelity of titles like Donkey Kong Country and Final Fantasy VII. Admittedly they look dated in hindsight, but the details are what made it work. When thinking about a graphical style for the game, I always wondered what games would have looked like had developers continue this route. Today most platformers are either Puppet Rigged Graphics, Pixel Art Throwbacks, or have real time DirectX/OpenGL 3d rendering. All of them have their own inherent beauty, but that being said, I believe that we live in a day and age when most computer processing can handle HD sprites, and there are many possibilities that we have yet to explore.


Video