STUFF - Game Design

MFA Visual Communication Design Thesis | Interactive Sustainable Role-Playing Game Design

Highly Commended Game of the Year Winner | 2015 CG Student Awards | Autodesk

Stuff: The Abandoned Land is an interactive role-playing game web application designed to help teenagers and young adults understand environmental destruction and the importance of recycling and reducing waste.

The purpose of this game is to introduce awareness of environmental destruction and recycling. Chien-Ju used After Effects to create a motion graphic typographic animation to introduce the game's narrative.

After Chien-Ju completed the game style and development capability research, he chose to work on the isometric angle view with HTML5 2D Canvas.

There are 7 combat levels and 1 shelter town in this game. In order for the user to switch between each stage, the world map has a great interface for the user to select a previous stage in which to fight with monsters and level up the character. The world map can help the user to understand a brief geography worldview of this game.

The name of this game is called “Stuff.” Chien-Ju used this word to express a term of unwanted things. It expresses the general term of unsorted garbage that does not sort out into recyclable items.

The game control panel is a set of buttons to trigger the game activities or open up the panels. The control buttons include the defense, character ability and inventory, skill, attack and move buttons.

The inventory panel is divided into two sections: equipped weapon and armor and inventory. The equipped and inventory description boxes are on top of each other to allow the user to compare the item properties. This panel has a feature to equip or unequip the character or use the recovery items.

The main character was created in Maya. The texture style is simple, clean and stylish, which fits with the design of the environment. Chien-Ju used the shape tool in Photoshop to outline the standard shape, then he used the brush tool to add simple shading and shadow to enhance the detail of the flat color.