Morphlers is a third-person multiplayer arena game with a distinctly organic feel. In order to win players have to work in teams to capture crystals for points, devour creatures to gain abilities and evolve, as well as to undermine the opponent team in order to achieve victory. Morphlers are cutesy yet violent and malleable beings that erupt from the fleshy soil, and whose only goals are to acquire powers by devouring the local fauna as well as other Morphlers, in order to eventually win the war to conquer all the crystals of the area.
My task in the team project was to work on the environment and level design. I worked closely with our art director to find a suitable environment for her characters, and we devised our color palettes together, using traditional oil pastels that were scanned and used as custom textures on Photoshop CS6.
Inspired by the vivid colors and aesthetics of microscopic and electron photography, the realm of the Morphlers is a lively and strange place textured in bright shades of oil pastels. The environment consists of fleshy structures full of crystals, scars, zits, and warts, and at their edges pustules and tentacle-like formations wriggle and undulate. The bright colors mixed with the somewhat uncomfortable fleshy quality of the surroundings create a joyous feeling with strong undertones of unease, and that dichotomy is exactly what the Morphlers universe is about.
The layout of the levels is composed of sets of intricate pathways that direct the flow of the game towards choke points where the players will confront one another in order to gain control Crystals, while still giving offering alternative paths in order to allow the players to ambush or avoid one another. In order to maintain the organic feel of the game, the level layouts are irregular-shaped, but the distance between each Morphler’s spawning points and the map’s objectives are always equal in order to keep the game balanced and fair.
Team Members:
Alicia Fortier (Lead Designer)
Alexander Westcott (Music, Game Design)
Eva Cvijanovic (Character animation and art, Art Direction)
Ana Tavera Mendoza (Environment art, Level Design)
Eric Robitaille (Gameplay Programming)
Gabrielle Lafrance (Gameplay Programming)
Richard Wou (Network Programming)