The Apprentice

Overview

The Apprentice is a game where you play as a sorcerer. You have a wizard apprentice who warns you that the village wants to lynch you for practicing the dark arts. To teach them a lesson, you turn your apprentice into a brawny fighter to wipe out the villagers. The dark arts are tricky, however, so beware...

Contributors

Designers

Max Kapoh

Ashley Muir

Programmers

Shaun Allen

Adrian White

Animators

Erika Verkaaik

Jayde Nossiter

Isabel Fernandez

Andrew Moore

Patrick Hewitt

Kaylah Hasson

Audio

Sarah Botta - SFX/Sound Producers

Caleb Williams - SFX/Sound Producers

Nathan Roser - Mastering

Harley Williams - Voice/Music/SFX/Sound Producers

Artist Statement

We utilized theories learned in lectures like the Gestalt Principles and using Stimuli to refine the player experience on both a visual processing level and a cognitive level.

UI

The 2D cutscene at the start uses closure. Closure is giving key parts of an event/image and the audience fills in the gaps. Giving simple 2D images as the key events accompanied by voice lines and letting the player use their imagination to envision the story.

All the text is coloured specifically to imply emotion into them. Yellow/gold text is used to grab attention, blue and purple text is used to invoke thought and red text is used to convey danger. Humans automatically perceive these colours with these emotions.

Level

From the beginning, the player is shown what the objective is as a house off in the distance with the lights on. The player automatically sees this as a point of reference on where to go.

These fences and houses (along with assortment of general village objects) are curved around the level to guide the player in the right direction, Instead of having corners to block the player off.

Using Gestalt continuation, the lighting in the level is also constructed to guide the player. All the light posts are pointing in the direction of the level. Everywhere you see that is darkness is also used to move the player away from the area. Such as the fork in the road, the area that is dark is then avoided by the player.

GamePlay

To implement trust into a single player game we looked at what trust means.To us, trust is a metacognitive process that communicates between two parties at a subconscious level. One or both parties have exposed vulnerabilities, but neither party takes malicious advantage of them. So giving your apprentice all this power in trade of your health puts yourself at risk to help him kill the enemies. Much the same as we trust a friend to not stab us in the back.

Stimuli

The stimuli we used was 3 things. A word, song and an image. Out of the stimuli given to us, we decided to choose Giving as our word, Kanye West's - POWER and Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night painting.

Word - We chose the word Giving as an inspiration to you giving power to someone but in turn, make yourself vulnerable

Music - We chose 'POWER' Due to Kanye talking about how much power he is. He talks about how people dislike him for being so. "No one man should have all that power". This comes back to the power thirst from the apprentice.

Visual - Vincent Van Gogh's painting is a clear example of how the town will look aesthetically.