Description

Iris is a 2D side-scrolling adventure platformer that tells a story of Iris who has to save her sister in the exquisite world of Chromaland. A young promising archer, Iris utilizes a magical bow to reveal otherworldly creatures and environmental objects through the eyes found within the world of Chromaland.

History

Beginnings

This project started off with Ka Yan's desire to create the kind of game she had always wanted to make. Four like-minded, motivated and hardworking individuals came together and agreed to make the most awesome game there would ever be in DigiPen. We settled on the game's genre, the art style and the tools needed to build the game instantly. And so began our journey of creating Iris into what it is today.

During Development

The entire development process took 2 semesters (6 milestones), plus 3 months. That added up to about a little more than 10 months. We were actually down to 3 members in the 2nd semester as our producer, Muhsen, had to intern at a gaming company for 3 months. However, he still gave some contribution during that period and resumed focusing on developing Iris after his internship.

As was the norm with game development, we encountered many problems, mostly technical but some gameplay ones too. We constantly found ourselves discussing and seeking creative ways to solve these problems. We had conducted many playtest sessions and as a result, lots of iterations in the game and level design were made. We owed most of the success of our game through these playtests.

Immediately after our Gold milestone, our lecturer suggested that we submitted our game for the IGF competiton. But we knew the standards were pretty high. Thus vast, monumental improvements had be made. We dedicated the last three months improving the game's story, visual and audio, with only some minor gameplay tweaking as we felt that the gameplay had already reached its peak.

After Release

Iris was featured in GameJolt. It received many wonderful feedbacks and gained a lot of support from the enthusiastic players in the website. And yet, this was before the team came up with the "Remastered" version of Iris with improved story, visuals and audio, which was made specifically for the IGF competiton. On 12 September 2014, Iris is being nominated as one of the Student Finalist for Independent Games Festival China 2014.

After DigiPen

The members of the team behind Iris had graduated from DigiPen and moved on to pursue their dream careers in the game industry. We hope to be able to work together again in the future and create a sequel or a spinoff for Iris. So do stay updated with us, you might be in for a surprise in the future!