THE FURROW
A turn-based roguelike RPG inspired by FTL and Slay the Spire. It features an embedded narrative that unfolds between two travelling companions traversing a treacherous valley.
MY ROLE
Game Design, Concept Art, Art Direction, Art + Animation
TIMELINE
13 Week, Graduation Project
TOOLS
Unity, Photoshop, After Effects, Pen + Paper
Make sure to follow the quick start guide!
THE GAP (AT THE TIME)
In 2019, we found that the rogue-like genre typically neglects character driven narratives as a design focus in lieu of emergent gameplay and interesting mechanics. We wanted to build a game that has the emotional investment from a more personal story, while still providing the replayability that comes from a randomly generated world. It has been reassuring to see games like Hades, Returnal, and Inscryption, breaking new grounds in the genre with wonderfully rich narratives and worlds.
PROCESS
We love whiteboards.
COLLABORATIVE IDEATION
After laying out our goals, we began by ideating as a team as to what kind of game we wanted to make using the greatest ideation tool of all — whiteboards. It was here that we strategically chose a project that aligned with our passions, utilized our skillsets, while staying within scope for our 3-person team. So we decided to build a turn-based tactical rogue-like featuring expanding character relationships. We later learned that this was certainly not the description for a realistically scoped project, but we’ll get to that later.
SKETCHING + CONCEPT ART
I helped to start us off on the right foot by quickly sketching a variety of options to help us visualize the art direction, characters, combat perspective, and game modes. After deciding on what we were most excited about, I used Photoshop to digitally paint more detailed concept art and in-game mockups.
COMBAT PERSPECTIVE
A collection of my early sketches exploring how combat in our game could work.
I painted a digital mockup would become the blueprint for our combat prototype.
I tried an isometric option that we avoided due to our lack of 3D modelling experience.
OVERWORLD MAP
My early sketches of our map layout.
I painted some concept art for how fog could be used to hide the full layout.
One of my concept sketches for a converging map design.
Another concept sketch for a simpler overworld map and its surroundings.
CAMP SCENE
My first sketch depicting the camp scene.
The final in-game camp scene.
CHARACTERS FIRST
One of our design pillars throughout development was “characters first”, so once their stories were written, I began sketching to explore what they might look like. Part of this early visual development was also to decide on the visual fidelity of our in-game art. In the end, I digitally painted the character’s body segments in Photoshop, and used a sprite rigging tool in After Effects to create their animations.
CHARACTER ARCHETYPE: “YOUNG HUNGRY WANNABE”
My sketches to develop Ide, one of our main characters.
The final character sprite for Ide.
CHARACTER ARCHETYPE: “OLD TIRED LEGEND”
My sketches exploring variations of Aldric, our other main character.
The final animated character sprite for Aldric.
PROTOTYPING
We knew it would be important to prototype the two gameplay modes that involved higher stakes choices — the overworld map and turn-based combat. We conducted playtests using a paper-prototype of our overworld map to balance encounter progression and better understand player choices. Our developer also built an early prototype of our combat system that we tested as a team to get an early feel for what types of abilities the players and enemies could use.
Conducting a paper prototype playtest of our overworld encounter layout.
An early combat prototype created by our developer, Logan Buchanan.
GAME MODES
OVERWORLD
The core loop of the Furrow consists of 3 modes — the Overworld, Combat, and the Camp. In the Overworld, the player traverses a converging set of nodes, each with a random encounter. We were inspired by FTL: Faster Than Light to create encounters that are made up of narrative dilemmas or combat challenges.
COMBAT
We took inspiration from Mega-man: Battle Network, and designed the turn-based combat to occur on opposing 4x4 grids while controlling two characters simultaneously. The player’s choices on the overworld serve primarily to benefit their abilities during combat. We designed a number of different enemy archetypes that could be grouped together to create a diverse set of challenges.
CAMP
Our Camp mode provides the player a sense of relief from the constant danger of the overworld. These ‘break periods’ are common in roguelikes and it made an excellent container for our game’s narrative progression. Once players gain enough ‘bond points’ through successful combat encounters, they unlock the ability to bond during Camp. While bonding, players see the relationship between the main characters develop through rich dialogue before being rewarded with unlocking a new combat ability.
REFLECTION
It was during development of this game that I first experienced the feeling of being on a “dream team”. I’ll always be grateful to have been able to work with such talented friends as Jules and Logan. We poured our passions, personalities, and creativity into every part of the game, and I’m very happy with what we were able to create. That being said, there are some things I would have done differently:
Prioritize scope. In hindsight, a “narrative-driven, turn-based tactical roguelike RPG” sounds way out of scope for 3 university students building one of their first games. We should have started smaller, and slowly iterated outwards.
Start simple, then iterate. We tried to include too many systems from the get-go. Rather than try to include conditions, items, abilities, and enemy types, we should have built a solid combat system that works, then see how we could expand on it.
Jason Procyk of Electronic Arts — our industry mentor and an alumnus of the SIAT program at SFU — had this to say of The Furrow:
“This project is exemplary. It is among the best work (if not the best) I have seen come out of the SIAT program. I particularly appreciate the [team’s] holistic effort, ingenuity and quality, humility and transparency, and drive to learn.”
