Fit, an AfroMetroidvania

Fit is an AfroMetroidvania prototype developed in 2021 as part of our 2nd year varsity assignments.

This project focused on encompassing art and audio to create mood and atmosphere. We were introduced to African artists to inspire our own art process. Owusu-Ankomah, the artist I was inspired by, is a leading contemporary African artist with origins in Ghana. His work addresses themes of identity and the body, using his trademark motif of Adinkra symbolism .

Fit briefly walks the player through a friend helping another to resolve a fight with accompanying artwork and audio.

As a metroidvania, we were required to include appropriate mechanics and themes.  I focused on giving the player "abilities" that aligned with the friend's narrative. I wanted these to be discovered in creative ways so I tried my hand at basic portals. This project was another opportunity to practice making a third person controller but I found that I didn't like the inversed nature of this specific one. 

Let me know what you think of this idea, if I should take it further and maybe what you would like to see if I had to revisit it. Thank you for taking the time to check out this project!

Here are some notes I made at the time:

Intentions:

The way in which Owusu-Ankomah draws outlines of figures in his paintings gave me a sense of ‘fitting’. This essence made me think firstly of how people fit into society but then I narrowed and directed it to how we let others fit in with ourselves. More so, the space that we make for them. I realised I could achieve this idea by literally making the player shrink the character through a power up in order for it to fit through a small gap and finish the game. I included a spoken narrative that takes the player through a reconciliation of a fight with a friend.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

Playtesting turned out to be my biggest strength in this assignment. I felt lost at first at how I would achieve my abstract ideas of theme and gameplay, but after playtesting other people’s games and seeing how they implemented the artwork and mechanics, I got a sense of what I could do in this game.

My biggest weakness was that I feel that I took too long to decide what to do. The lack of confidence in my idea lead me to spend too much time faffing over things that weren’t important or doing too much research which just became overwhelming. Eventually, I just dove straight in and started trying things out in Unity which helped get things going. So in this scenario, too much thinking/planning and little action wasn’t as helpful.