Mapatuo
A Mind of its own.
Maria Fleischer | Philip Hildebrandt | Julia Vetter | Lila Pimpão Niederle
3rd semester, 2019/20 | Game Design at HTW Berlin
3D Game | 12 Objects
3 months
Prof. Susanne Brandhorst | Prof. Thomas Bremer
Team
Date
Constraints
Duration
Supervised by
PROJECT DETAILS
MAPATUO is an experimental, abstract toolkit. In its center floats a moving formation of slowly falling stones. To influence the continuous fall of the stones, players are given various tools including rods to connect stones to each other or magnets that attract everything.
From messy nets, to polygonal masses, up to long chains — everything is possible. As long as it is still connected to a fixed stone, the limit is the player’s imagination.
MY CONTRIBUTION
Technical Art | Game Design | Project Management
Creating the concept behind the game and overviewing the development were two of my main tasks for this project. Based on the the concepts of our artists I later created the Shaders and Models for the game.
This also was the first project where I supervised the whole progress and organized the development.
DEVELOPMENT
After a first phase of analog prototyping, we started implementing our first ideas into small digital prototypes. We adopted this style of rapid implementation and testing into our workflow which helped us to quickly make decisions about what we wanted to include into the final project.
TECHNICAL ART
The challenge while creating the visuals of Mapatuo were to not trigger a specific image in the players. I wanted the game to stay as abstract as possible but still feel compelling to play. I made a few qick tests with the shaders to understand what could work and what not. After getting feedback for these trys I iterated over them and combined all the aspects I liked about the old ones.
Here are some of my tries for the shaders of the hendecahedrons: