Cardboard Kingdom

Student Entrant 2016


SCHOOL
DigiPen Institute of Technology
CREATOR
DigiPen Team Pillow Fort Games

Description

Cardboard Kingdom is a cooperative class based action brawler in the setting of a child's imagination drawn to life on a chalkboard. Frank the frog has stolen the three magic chalk pieces which protect the Cardboard Kingdom. Choose to play as a cardboard knight, pillow ninja, or dart slinger as you journey across three regions of the kingdom and take on three adorably dangerous bosses. Only you can save the Cardboard Kingdom!

Our game began with a single idea: to tell a compelling story through our game. As a student game team at DigiPen with limited time and resources, it was certainly an ambitious idea, but we were confident that we could pull it off with the capable team that we had assembled. For us, the biggest risk with this idea was with the art. The artists on the team had to work on the game in their free time outside of classes, and so we were never sure how much time they had to create assets. This is where we came up with the idea of a game themed around cardboard, chalk, and toys. Rather than add variety in our environments with 3D assets that required an artist to model, we could instead populate them with cardboard squares overlaid with 2D art, which could be drawn by the programmers if necessary. Our enemy designs were also much simpler and required fewer animations. Originally, we planned for all our bosses to be built into the environment (as with our final boss) so that we could create interesting fights without having to create assets specific to those bosses. In the end though, we decided that we didn't have time to tell the story as well as we wanted, and instead chose to focus more on the combat and multiplayer experience, with the story and theme playing more of a background role in tying the game together.


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