Eira: Echoes of Adventure

Eira: Echoes of Adventure

Eira: Echoes of Adventure is a casual adventure game where you play as Eira and trace your grandfather’s footsteps to journey through an icy world filled with curious alien wildlife, spatial puzzles, and hoards of treasure. Use your powerful GalactiVac to terraform the frozen landscape in a sandbox abundant with riches and valuable gems. Rebuild a path through the broken world to follow the dangerous journey your grandfather once took. Track down the remnants of blueprints to upgrade your GalactiVac, unlocking new passages full of treasures and secrets to explore in every region. Will you be able to solve the mystery of your grandpa’s disappearance?

A Powerful GalactiVac!

In Eira: Echoes of Adventure, the player is equipped with a vacuum gun tool that acts as their interface with the rest of the world. The GalactiVac drives the core pillars of our gameplay...

- Exploration with a sense of discovery
- Interaction with level elements and wildlife
- Progress through the collection of resources in levels

Get Eira: Echoes of Adventure for FREE

The game was published to Steam on May 8th (click that link). It can be played for FREE!

Key Features

Terraformable Terrain
Use your powerful GalactiVac to terraform the frozen landscape. Build with snow to reach new heights. Melt ice to find what secrets have been frozen in the world.

Repairable Structures
Find resources throughout levels to repair ladders, bridges, and more. Everything you repair gives you rewards that can go toward upgrading your GalactiVac.

Spatial Puzzles
Explore different levels to find puzzles leading to secrets. Every level in the game is littered with spaces to explore and treasure to find.

Curious Alien Wildlife
Alien wildlife is bouncing around this planet trying to eat up enough fish-fruit to stay happy and full. Use the wildlife to your advantage to explore the planet and discover new secrets.

Hoards of Treasure
If you have a treasure finding itch you need to scratch, we’ve got you covered. There are tons of treasure chests hidden throughout the planet. Can you find them all?

The Original Concept

Eira: Echoes of Adventure originally started as Vacuum Vault, a Mars-like space themed treasure hunter. The original concept was more oriented to collecting as much treasure as possible. We ended up shifting our game to include a story to make it more of an adventure and changed our theme to a Norse-inspired snowscape. Our lead artist, Nick Kline made the decision to scrap most of our art assets to create a more cohesive art style with our space snow (previously known as space sand). These changes were made to fit our aesthetic needs but also because we wanted a story to help drive the player's motivation. We found that collecting treasure is fun, however, it’s not enough to keep a player engaged and coming back for more.

Below is a video created by our systems designer, Jared Ciano, showing the iterations we made on our vacuum gun over the first semester of development. 

So… Space Snow? What’s That?

Great question! Space Snow is our terraformable terrain - the signature feature in Eira: Echoes of Adventure. When we were originally prototyping games, everyone loved our vacuum gun (later named GalactiVac). It started as a tool that allowed players to suck up blocks of sand that dispensed resources. The player could also pick up objects to throw them or get rewards by putting them in predetermined places like a key. As a team, we decided to go one step further... fully terraformable terrain. Space Snow is a terrain object that can be built on or vacuumed up. We also have variations of the terrain including ice and gold. Using GalactiVac upgrades, the player can interact with these different terrains. You can shoot fire at the ice to melt it and reveal new passages. If you vacuum up gold, you get a LOT of gold. Gold can be used to purchase other upgrades that grant new abilities to interact with more content in each level.

How Was Space Snow Made?

Space Snow was created by our programmer, Tyler Chapman. Above is an image showing different marching cube iterations (image found on marchingcubes.org). Here is how he describes how the feature works.
“Our terrain terraforming uses a surface extraction algorithm called marching cubes. That’s just a fancy way of saying make shapes out of the vertices of a cube by adding or removing them from what is drawn. The giant mesh we have is split up into smaller sections called chunks. When a player terraforms a specific position on the mesh, it will find out which chunk was hit, then find which cube in that chunk was hit, and then perform the marching cube algorithm on that cube. The mesh is then updated for just that one chunk, not the entire mesh as that would take too long. Think of it like removing a single block from a giant lego building.”

Since we wanted to incorporate level design into our game, we decided against making the whole map terraformable. Instead, we placed a layer of the terrain over the map and morphed it to our liking. Tyler was able to break the terrain into chunks so we could set each chunk to have different values. This allowed us to assign chunks different types like ice or snow, but we could also modify the drops of each chunk. If there was snow by a repairable wooden structure, we had the flexibility to give additional wood drops from the snow so players would have enough resources. 

Level Design and Iteration

Eira: Echoes of Adventure has a total of 3 levels; Cold Cavern, Mighty Mountain, and The Vacuum Vault. Originally, there were 5 levels including a tutorial and a level in between Cold Cavern and Mighty Mountain. With a combination of remote work and scope, we decided to merge our tutorial into the Cold Cavern and remove the additional level. Two level designers, Claire Yeash and Zachary Fugere spent the second semester developing these levels from the ground up. Zachary's initial designs were used for the Cold Cavern and Mighty Mountain. When we changed our levels around, Claire took charge of polishing Cold Cavern and finishing full development on our final vault level while Zachary focused on polishing Mighty Mountain. In the video above, Claire takes us through her process of polishing the first level to Steam published quality.

A huge challenge for our designers was creating puzzles for players that could be completed with the flexibility of Space Snow. The terraformable terrain provided unlimited opportunities for players to build around the map and explore--this made puzzle design a nightmare to get right. After many iterations, we found that giving the player broad objectives with multiple solutions was the best way to go. Do you want to build giant bridges with snow? Go for it. Do you want to find resources to repair structures? Heck yeah! Do you just want to feed all the cute goat-walruses?... well duh, everyone does. By giving the player tools and multiple routes, terraforming didn’t dominate puzzles as the only viable solution.

To see more level design content, visit Claire Yeash and Zachary Fuguere on our senior show page. 

The Team Story

Originally, there were 5 developers working on the game in late August as part of our senior capstone at Champlain College. We were one of 24 teams to present a vertical slice of a game to get resources to continue development the following semester. 8 total teams made the cut. We took on 11 additional developers from other teams, plus we contracted several other team members outside of the senior game studio. Since we started production in January, our team worked extremely hard to create the game we believed in. It was a rocky road to start, but we got the ball rolling smoothly up until March. I guess you may already know what happened then--REMOTE DEVELOPMENT! Yup, our team (and I’m sure every other development team in the world) was forced into remote work. This was a huge transition for our team, but we managed to pull it together after 1-2 weeks. Michael-Paul Ho-Kang-You spearheaded this change in process as our Lead Producer. He managed to recreate schedules that worked for everyone, and we changed how our team structure was managed. Originally, we were working in two split development teams, one focusing on content and the other on systems. Once remote work started, we changed to working in our own disciplines (art, design, programming) and met as a team and cross-disciplines periodically. This helped our pipeline efficiency in remote work because we eliminated most blockers in communication between disciplines. At the end of our final semester, the team had logged over 4500 hours and created about 4 hours of unique content on Steam. If you haven’t played the game yet, it’s FREE on Steam! 

Development Team

SEE MORE INFO ON OUR SENIOR SHOW PAGE!

- Michael-Paul Ho-Kang-You: Lead Producer | Scrum Master
- Scott Aquino: Lead Programmer | Systems Programmer
- Tyler Chapman: Systems Programmer | Terrain Tools
- Karim Elzanaty: Tools Programmer | Systems Programmer
- William Gordon: AI Programmer | Technical QA
- James Smith: Programmer | Technical QA
- Nicholas Kline: Lead Artist | Technical Animator
- Hannah Greiner: Technical Artist | Environment Artist
- Max Laudenslager: Environment Artist | Material Artist
- Andersen Pinckney: Product Owner | Lead Designer
- Jared Ciano: QA Lead | Systems Designer
- Nicholas Deluzio: Lead Audio Designer | Content Designer
- Zachary Fugere: Level Designer | Content Designer
- Andrew MacDonald: Narrative Designer | Community Management
- Claire Yeash: Level Designer | Technical Designer
- Bryan Richardson: Development Support | Producer
- Abigail Scott: Marketing Lead
- Alexis Sophabmixay: Cutscene Artist
- Rowan Minney: Audio Designer