Octavia

Action Puzzle Adventure
Jun. 2013

Octavia is an action-puzzle game that player navigates a Roman girl Octavia through complicated spatial puzzles while avoids all the lurking dangers with skillful movements to escape from a sunken ship. In her journey she will encounter the dead people haunting on the ship and the mermaids, who granted her blessings and powers but may or may not be trustworthy.

Features
- About 1 hour’s gameplay
- Action, puzzle & narrative
- Roman Underwater Fantastic Theme
- 11 challenging levels
- Multiple paths/endings

[Octavia Trailer for IndieCade 2013 Edited by Nick Zhang]

Download & Play

    Download for Mac OS
    Download for Windows

Game Design Details

The core mechanism in Octavia was inspired by the ice-sliding puzzle in Pokémon. Octavia cannot turn left or right until she reaches a wall. 

This simple mechanic provides a huge potential to design challenging levels.

We introduced the benefish with a lively AI that add a layer of action & skills to the game – Octavia needs to avoid the fish with boost, slowing down as well as good timing, otherwise the enraged fish could take out her oxygen. 

We struggled a lot with the instinct conflicts between puzzle & action gameplay. During playtest sessions we found that players can hardly think and plan when they need to react to urgent events like angry fish attacks. Thus, a stealth mechanic - the fish do not attack you unless you touch them or their eggs - was introduced to separate the action part and the puzzle part of the game, which gives the game a better rhythm of doing & thinking.

To integrate the narrative in a more meaningful way, two special abilities granted by the NPCs (dead people on the sunken ship and the Geira, merfolks who live undersea) were introduced. The ghost blessing turns Octavia into a ghost that can phase through cracked walls and slow down the time, while the mermaid power transforms her into a mermaid that scares off the fish and refills oxygen. However, abusing those abilities could be dangers to the human soul...

Ghost Form

Mermaid Form

Other features were added to provide more depth of gameplay. Kelp can serve as safe spots that hide you from the fish; water current redirects Octavia, which provides new ways of solving puzzles; fish eggs are something you don’t really want to touch though you have to sometimes...

Credits

    Atlas Chen
    Game Designer, Level Designer, Gameplay Programmer, Playtest Coordinator

    James Chapin
    Game Designer, Writer, Playtest Coordinator

    Nick Zhang
    Game Designer, UI Programmer, Asset Implementor, Playtest Coordinator

    S.Teesdale
    Game Designer, Art Director, 2D Artist

    Shoshana Kessock
    Game Designer, Project Manager, Audio/Voice Over Designer

    *Music Composed by Tony Yan*