NIM

Concept
Christine Ling

Media Design
Alastair Babbage
Arapaoa Moffat
Christine Ling

Computer Science
Carl Anderson
James Veugelaers
Matt Pruyer-Smith

Nim held the balance of the universe together with his magical staff, but when a thief stole it, it shattered, scattering its pieces across the now-broken dimensions. Play as Nim and find all the missing shards in order to restore balance to the universe!

NIM is the result of the final project for our third-year Game Design paper in Victoria University (MDDN342) under Peter Freer. Its initial concept was pitched by myself, and I was once again honored in it being chosen, along with 8 other ideas in the stream to be made into real games.

This game is a group effort across three different disciplines, and was a very rewarding experience. My main role was as designer and modeller, though I also handled all the Particle Systems and colour schemes as they seem to be my strengths in games.

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Concepts and Processes

My initial pitch: What if, instead of being able to just move left and right in your average side-scroller game, you could move backwards and forwards within the foregrounds and backgrounds of the game itself? I have always been interested in watching the backgrounds of side-scrollers, wishing I could explore those planes as well.

For our final year Game Design project, I came up with the idea for a wizard-like figure, whose purpose was in keeping the balance of these planes separate and stable. However, when the staff that harnessed this power was stolen by an evil and unworthy thief, the staff broke into pieces, shattering the balance of the universe with it.

Nim must then traverse between planes in order to slowly find the pieces of his missing staff and eventually return the world to the way it was before!

I had also pitched it as a 2D game, acting in a 3D world, with a triangulated/low-poly art-style as I have not seen many other games with this stylistic approach before. However, as the other two designers of this game were more equipped at 3D Modelling in Maya, we soon swapped the game to a completely 3D view, and got rid of the low-poly, triangulated look completely.

Below are some sketches and my initial concept proposals of NIM. Feel free to have a read of its document.

download the design document