Atua Motu
On an island full of mysteries and ancient magic, Alex seeks to rid the land and its inhabitants of a great spirit monster, Ochano. Be careful who you trust.
Inspiration
I wanted to create an adventure RPG with a mythological backstory like the ones I'd enjoyed when I was younger. In early 2021, I had the opportunity to play Life is Strange and I loved the idea of user choices leading to different consequences during the game. I decided to take it one step further and allow the user to have entirely different game endings depending on what choices they made. Once I had these concept fragments, a fuller picture began to form and Atua Motu – the island of mysteries – was born.
Description
Atua Motu is a top-down adventure RPG. The player is required to complete quests across the island to win favour with the
islanders and gain important clues about the main game objective. The game will end differently depending on how the
player interprets the clues and who the player decides to trust.
The player must remember the information they are given throughout the game because it will
become helpful later. A partial example is shown below. The player completes Rocky's quest, thereby unlocking
Rocky's advice (incomplete to prevent spoilers) about the final boss, the fire spirit Ochano. If the player remembers this advice,
they will likely be able to solve Ochano's riddle and better progress towards the ideal ending.
The island of Atua Motu contains eight main areas: the Town, the Beach, the Desert, the Volcano, the Forest, the Rock Caves, the Cliff, and the Ice Caves.
The player starts in the Town at the beginning of any game-day. They can visit the other areas on the island to
meet other islander spirits and learn more about how to complete their mission.
The main gameplay includes completing quests all over Atua Motu's map.
A few of the quests can be seen in action below. There is fishing on the Beach,
wayfinding in the Forest maze, a melee in the Volcano, and a skating puzzle to get through the Ice Caves.
The quests that are not shown here include mining in the Rock Caves, digging in the Desert, pest control in the Town gardens,
rock climbing on the crumbling Cliff, and apple picking around the Town.
Each completed quest returns important clues about the island and the final boss confrontation. If the player does not complete
a quest on their first try, they are able to return the next day to try again. However, they only have 10 days to cover the whole
island and collect the islanders' clues.
The game's pause menu has information about gameplay, inventory, and quests. As the player completes quests, they
disappear from the Quests menu. The inventory is also regularly updated as items are picked up or received, and it
remains consistent as the player travels through the world. Each item has an image, a quantity, and a helpful description
that appears when the inventory item is selected. In the inventory example below, the tablet's description is shown.
Atua Motu ensures that users have the resources to complete the game with a good ending on their first try, but multiple play-throughs are encouraged for players that want to achieve every possible ending. By providing shortcuts that allow players skip through animations, dialog, and cut scenes, the game prevents user frustration over multiple play-throughs.
Development
The story was fundamental to the player's motivation throughout the game, so I started by making
sure I was clear on Atua Motu's lore. Once I had the main character's story, I built the minigames as
"quests" for the player to complete before they meet the final boss. This game was developed using Unity,
Inky and C#. My initial version of the game had a smaller world with 4 basic minigames and 3 unique endings.
For the second version of the game, I worked with team of developers to expand the game into a bigger world with
9 minigames and over 10 unique endings.
The game is available to play on MacOS or Windows, and you can
find the executable game file on GitHub.