Emilie Zhang's Portfolio
Chapter 1: The Curse of Gravity
Wellesley Playable Media Lab,
Prof. Jordan Tynes
A 3D first-person parkour; game included in Wellesley Annual Video Game Showcase.
Team
Wellesley Playable Media Lab; Prof. Jordan Tynes
Emilie Zhang, Wellesley College
Valen Foo, Wellesley College
Game designer, programmer for custom scripts
Chapter 1: The Curse of Gravity is a 3D first-person parkour that begins at the bottom of a reversed temple. Something has disrupted reality and turned the temple upside down. It seems that the only way to escape...is up. Through a series of parkour challenges that bring you higher and higher into the belly of the temple, perhaps you just may have the combination of luck and skill to break the curse.
​
My Role:
-
Game designer, because of unique circumstances, I was the only person with access to the lab to create the entire game in Unity
-
Programmer, collaborating to create original scripts in C++ for game mechanics such as transforming the player's coordinates for a checkpoint system
-
Narrative designer, brainstormed with partner to create an entire narrative arc, world lore, and characters. This game is one chapter of that vision.
Role
3 weeks, 2023
Timeline
Tools
Unity
C#
Overview
in-game screenshots from the outside, and from the inside looking up
Partnering with Valen Foo, we created the first chapter of our vision with the Wellesley Playable Media Lab. Our vision for the larger game begins when you, an adventurer, stumble through the forest and find an abandoned town that has been lost to time. You are surprised to find that everything is still intact, though dilapidated, and that a huge temple stands erect at the end of civilization. Intrigued, you enter the towering temple to find an invaluable crown at the center. Succumbing to greed, you go to take it but when you touch the crown, you are sucked into a powerful curse placed over the entire town and its inhabitants hundreds of years ago. You find a variety of enchanted items, and these objects had instrumental roles in the conflict that happened, and have trapped the ghosts of townspeople in its puzzle space. Breaking all (three) enchantments can lead you to break the curse put on this town and leave this place before it’s too late.
​
This game, The Curse of Gravity, represents one of the three enchantments we envisioned, where the temple has been turned upside down. This parkour game requires the combination of skill and strategy to reach the top of the inverted temple and break the curse. The challenge? Don't fall down.
Custom Assets
in-game screenshots; example of custom assets
Apart from the usual software development and design being done in Unity, my partner and I created many custom assets for this project. More specifically, we custom-made almost all parkour platforms as well as its animations, and wrote a custom script for a checkpoint system that allows players to retry from their last checkpoint.
Playthrough
The following playthrough was downloaded and played on an M1 Macbook Air using Parallel Windows and x360e to simulate a Windows Desktop with an XBox controller. On a better device and using a controller, the movements of the character and environment load much better.