Hope

Hope is a platformer puzzle game based on the Greek myth of Pandora's box that mixes 2D and 3D. We follow the personification of hope. During their journey, they'll encounter lots of endearing characters but also the miseries that burden mankind.

Thanks to the light that resides in their heart, Hope can shoot a ball of the mentioned light that teleports them. It will help them solve puzzles and progress in this world in the hope to finally escape the box.

2D art, character and environment design by Carcani Liseta

3D art by Elise Blees

Storytelling and music by Mathias Lafleur

Game design by Tom Grandjean Maglione

Level design by William Filipe

Art by Carcani Liseta

My role

Hope was developed within a small team of students as our final project.

We will follow here my work during the development of the artistic vision of the project and the creation of the 2D assets.

Ideation

To be able to prepare the 2D and provide a strong artistic direction I first went through a research stage. The project had already started when I joined, I thus had to base my approach on the already existing propositions. This also meant I had to ensure a sense of coherence between the world previously made and what was to come. This led to a heavy research process to give more meaning to the already existing story bits and visuals.

Art by Elise Blees

Art by Carcani Liseta

Environnements

Figure 1

Since 2D games requires a great deal of planning, I provided my coworkers with planned levels that would help them give depth to the levels, visually and story wise. We can see here 3 examples.

The areas in blue are what is supposed to be converted to 3D assets. This thus serves as a plan for our 3D artist.

We can find visual metaphors across all levels. We have for example in Figure 1, leaves and plants shaped as Greek keys. Hope being the key that will help us get from a section to another of the Pandora box. Hope is also the key to progress in the levels. Hence Greek keys will be a reccuring pattern.

Through the game, we will also find evidence hinting at nature of this world. It being a box, it is filled with strange mechanism such as cogs that you often find in puzzle boxes.

The forest is also filled with the remains of what seems to be an ancient temple. Even though it has been taking over by the forest, we can find different constructions such as mosaics that give us indications about the setting , lore and story. There is a heavy inspiration from Minoan civilization that resided on the island of Crete and which was particularly known for their mosaics and pottery.

Figure 2

Again we can see how in figure 3, the mosaics are used to tell the player what has happened. Since, the game remains vague about the setting, we want to infer as much lore as we can thanks to the surroundings.

We can also see how the world has been filled with mushrooms and how they spread like an illness. This level being the level themed around the calamity of the illness, we need to show it even though we don't tell it directly.

Figure 3

Characters

Aside from Hope, we encounter three characters during the prototype of the game : Lachesism, Atropos and Clotho. They are representations of the three Moirai from Greek mythology which are known to thread humans destiny. Each one of them has a story to tell in this game. While progressing and talking to them we'll uncover their backstories little by little.

Lachesis

Atropos

Clotho

Being in the level of illness, they all suffer from a different diseases. The goal in their design is to make the link to the Moirai and the diseases obvious.

Lachesis suffers from Alzheimer's disease.

Atropos suffers from the pneumonic plague.

Clotho suffers from measle.