Temple HaiTong（海瞳寺）

Design Overview

Firstly, with the theme of Chinese characters, we naturally associate them with idioms. Idioms have insightful meanings, often not simply adding up the meanings of each Chinese character, but rather having meanings hidden within the literal meaning.

This is the prototype of the gameplay: players can use the characters obtained in the scene to form idioms, and then use the characteristics of idioms to solve some levels, thereby unlocking new items, characters, and idioms.

Regarding the story, we came up with the theme of inheritance. A temple that loses people's worship will lose its incense and gradually tend to decline. Let the player play the role of a scholar. The player needs to use their idiom ability to collect various items required for the ritual, complete the ritual, and continue the incense in the temple, symbolizing the inheritance of Chinese character culture.

When designing the temple layout, we referred to some existing temple layouts. The overall square layout plan has been determined, with the main hall as the main body, and a central axis crossing the middle. Both sides are generally symmetrical, but there are many differences.

In terms of process guidance, we controlled the pace of players' information acquisition through obstacles, but there was no absolute information separation between scenes. On the contrary, we intentionally allowed players to see certain information within the area outside of the currently inaccessible area, which not only aroused players' curiosity but also set short-term goals in their hearts.

Game flowchart

The figure roughly shows the entire game process, consisting of items and word puzzles. We aim to enable players to understand text through symbolization, thereby crossing the cost of language learning and easily understanding Chinese character culture.

Character controller

In order to ensure that the speed of the character is controllable at all times, rather than relying on the motion of the physics engine, we have written a character controller that reads the time of the buttons.

The speed of the character will be read from the curve based on the button time and multiplied by the speed multiplier to obtain the current speed.

In addition to speed, we also used button time to control the animation playback, ultimately completing this fully controllable character controller.

Graphical

In order to visualize interactive objects, we have designed a material with a stroke effect and provided two interfaces, stroke color and stroke width, to facilitate us to dynamically adjust its display effect through mapping in the game. The shaders of the inner stroke are offset in four directions: up, down, left, and right. Subtract the offset transparent mask channel from the original shape's transparent mask channel to obtain the offset edge mask. Merge the edge masks from four directions to obtain a total edge mask, and then mix it with the edge color and the original shape to obtain the traced shape. 

 *Calculation formula for stroke width: weight * 0.003 (data for reference) 

 In order to make a static photo of a single cloud layer more dynamic, we use Berlin noise to mask the cloud layer, and use a clock as UV to achieve continuous Berlin noise. This shader opens up two parameters, speed and noise level, making it convenient for us to dynamically adjust the effect of the cloud layer. 

 *Berlin noise has continuity and is suitable for this seamless loop effect

Art Style

In order to fit the game background, we naturally chose traditional Chinese painting in the selection of art style, and then chose Gongbi painting because the edges of Gongbi painting are more neat and suitable as game materials.

In order to achieve the imitation of Gongbi painting as much as possible in digital painting, we adopted the drawing method of vector graphics to imitate the strokes of Gongbi painting.

In terms of coloring, we also use traditional meticulous painting techniques such as powder drawing, rendering, and baking to achieve the maximum restoration of meticulous painting style.