We try to capture the weird dreaming experience in our life by putting bizarre scenes and stories together into this game. The character in the game is a pencil while we try to represent a student, who suffers from massive pressure from his life so he felt asleep and had this weird dream about chasing by a donut a monster.

 

    The game takes the form of a platform game. It starts with the pencil character at the font and when it starts running, a donut monster follows it and tries to catch it. The goal of the player is to run through all the levels without being caught by the monster.  The player will win the game if he/she reaches the end and wakes up without being caught. The pencil needs to go through the scenes of the donut factory, donut shop and bathroom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    In the first level of the donut factory, the character need to finish the tasks such as jumping above oil pool, avoiding sugar frosting, running through punching machines, etc. At the end of this level, it will jump into a donut box and then be delivered to the donut shop to start the second level.

 

    Then the pencil starts its adventure in the donut shop and need to overcome candy obstacles. To express a sense of humor, we photoshoped the dunkin donut into drunken donut. And sometimes in our dream, we are so urge to find the restroom, so we also put this into the end of our level2 and the player pass the level by jumping into the toilet.

 

    Finally, the pencil character will reach the surrealistic level which indicates the surreal feeling towards time and space in dreams. Players can barely see what is around in the level because the background is so dark. The character itself is under spotlight and seeks for the way towards the end of the level. We also have this level in a circular mode instead of linear to represent the tangled feature of dreams.

 

    We made a trick to simulate the AI for the monster. We scripted that the monster’s motion is actually following the player’s motion, but 0.8s slower than the players. So it looks like the donut is having it’s own thought when he needs to jump.

 

    We created this game using Construct2, which is a great game prototype software supporting different physics and interactions. We drew all the characters, backgrounds and animations in Photoshop and created the game procedural logic in Construct2.

 

    We asked our friends to play test our game and got some feedbacks on visuals, sound effects, level design and interactions and we iterated on those to make it more user friendly.