Breathtaking
defeat your terrors and reclaim your breath
Mascha Ermakova | Meike Strippel | Hanna Scheck | Lila Pimpão Niederle
4th semester, 2020 | Game Design at HTW Berlin
Experimental Game Jam
3 weeks
Prof. Susanne Brandhorst | Prof. Thomas Bremer
Team
Date
Constraints
Duration
Supervised by
PROJECT DETAILS
Breathtaking focuses on creating a deeply emotional experience. It visualises the state of hyperventilation and the feeling of not being able to breathe. All the design choices during the creation were made to emphasize that feeling.
Players move around by nudging their breath sphere with their mouse. Doing so transforms the environment into a beautiful, lively color. If they stop or get caught by the enemies, not only the environment but eventually they themselves die. The goal is to defeat all enemies as a synonym to overcome your fears.
MY CONTRIBUTION
Game Design | UX Design | Gameplay Programming | Technical Art
Being mainly responsible for the concept of the game I focused on keeping the vision and amplifying the feelings we wanted to convey. I also helped creating the Shaders for the environment and made sure that all visual decisions made were to enhance the desired experience. I was also responsible for creating the sound for the game, opting for sound effects rather than music.
SCREENSHOTS
FOCUSING ON THE ESSENTIAL
We decided to restrict ourselves to a minimum of needed aspects to convey our game concept to have time to polish them. To make the environment feel more alive and threatening we decided to give it a bit of movement. To save some time for our artists, I implemented the standard movement of the enemies as procedural animation.