Seal Ordeal

About

Bounce into a delightful adventure with Seal Ordeal, a 3D retro-inspired cosy platformer that puts you in the flippers of an adorable seal! On land, your only means of movement is bouncing, but don’t worry! You’ll use your platforming skills to navigate the world around you and collect postcards to bring back to your selkie friend. That’s not all, on your travels keep an eye out for shinies, a valuable currency that can be used to purchase a variety of cosmetics from the shop.

Can you overcome each obstacle in your path and prove that you have what it takes to be a seal outta water? There's only one way to find out, jump in and get bouncing!

Available for download on our itch.io

Gameplay

The three pillars of Bounce

Momentum - Physics-based bounce can be mastered by players to achieve optimal movement but also serves as a challenge to keep even basic platforming interesting.

Verticality - Platforming segments that focus on climbing and upwards mobility.

Silliness -Fun, chaotic, mechanics that provide physical comedy and leave the players laughing.

Gameplay Loop

Unlock location  >  Explore  >  Collect Postcards and Shinies  >  Buy cosmetics  >  Return to Selkie

Bounceables

Seal ordeal makes use of a diegetic bounce language to inform players of what surfaces are bouncy, with stripy surfaces and selkies statues granting blubber high, and extremely high bounces. 

Concept

Seal Ordeal started from very modest beginnings. We wanted to make a game around the funny way seals Traverse on land. The concept of a seal bouncing to extreme heights and platforming around a small beach town came to us quickly and we bounced straight into prototyping.

As we solidified what Seal Ordeal was to be with the first few prototypes, we began concepting our world, characters, and most importantly style. The first style we explored was stylized realism. We made use of detailed half accurate depictions of blubber and the world around them.

We weren't happy with this and felt that our game required a more cute and soft art style. We landed on a pastel cartoony art style based on the aesthetics of retro games such as Mario Sunshine and more modern styles like CalArts focusing on large shapes and subtler details.

Development

With our Character prototypes complete we moved into full development in January of this year. We set out to create a vertical slice of what a fully-fledged Seal Ordeal would look like: With a hub world, first level, cosmetics, and NPC guide as our requirements.

Developing for low-end hardware

For our vertical slice, we decided to develop both for PC and a custom arcade rig running on Windows 7. We decided to do this as we saw a future where Seal ordeal would be available on lower-end consoles such as the Nintendo Switch. This challenge forced our artist to focus on optimisation throughout development.

Graphically we made use of a personalised material set created by our artist Zachary Ashenford for the project. To reduce the number of textures they created a colour mask material that allowed a mask to identify what areas of the model should be marked for colour changing. For the interiors of buildings, we made use of insert models with a LOD that would replace them with closed curtains at a certain distance.

Developing on a short timeframe

As our team was small and our development time was short, we decided to use third-party content to offset some of our shortcomings. Below is the full list of external content used in this project.

Thank you

Thank you for taking the time to read this entry. Seal Ordeal is currently available for download on our itch.io