Student project for master’s thesis.

Ping is a working title of an experimental game. It is an adventure game, in which you see the world in a different way. Inspired from games like “Journey” and “Flower”, it has a very abstract quality around the game. It is an exploration game in an organic world.

Much of the design for Ping has been based on or born from the visual style of the game. We had to figure out compelling ways to utilize the graphics. We created emitters, sources of life and energy, for these waves that would “light up” the game world. These worked well and they looked great but this made things feel too linear and didn’t promote the amount of exploration we had wanted in the game. We needed to give the player a way to create their own waves, something that would encourage the player to venture into the darkness. We first gave the player the ability to create waves around them. While this made it easier for the player, the visible portion of the world remained small and confined to the player’s immediate surroundings. That’s when we decided the player needed a way to see things that were further away from them, a way to probe the darkness. That’s when we gave them the ability to shoot energy in front of them. Where this energy landed, a wave was created. From that point we had our mechanics and from there we started designing the dynamics – the generation of different forms of life and their functions in the game world.