The Adventure of Ayla

Adventure of Ayla is 2D platformer game with Pixel Art as its main graphics and visual. The game's narrative story is referenced and inspired from Malaysia folk tale; Ulek Mayang.

The game is made by a group of students , Muhaimin, Azlan and Nabil. Muhaimin is the character designer, concept artist, character sprite artist and background artist. Nabil is the technical artist, UI/UX designer and tile set artist.  Azlan is the logo(in game) designer and narrative designer. 15.ai is used to generate character sound for dialogue while background music for level 1,2 & 3 is composed and produced by Marllon Silva a.k.a xDeviruchi. The main menu background music is made by Muhaimin.

Our goal in making this game.

We make this game more towards art purpose, making beautiful pixel sprites. The story of this game is referenced by Ulek Mayang. The concept of the Ulek Mayang story isn’t 100% applied for the game. Thus we come up with a mix of modern and traditional concepts. Resulting in why the humans wear modern and casual outfits but all the Puteri Bunian wear the outfits referenced from Ulek Mayang folk song lyrics.

In the Ulek Mayang story, the ‘Pawang’ battle the Puteri Bunian at the seaside, but for the game, we want to make our main character Ayla have to go on adventure. She will be venturing into the Bunian’s realm to save her husband Awang. Now, from here, we do the reverse Mario, in which Mario is the one who always saves Princess Peach but for our game, the girl saves the boy. This is as well to go against the stereotype that every girl needs to be saved by a man, we reverse it.

As for the graphic and visual, we go along with the pixel art, to bring nostalgia to people whose generations are playing Gameboy. From the character’s appearance, we are sure to say that our game isn’t meant to bring the experience of Ulek Mayang 100%. Only small parts like the outfits of the Bunian are part of heritage and cultural experience.

Finally from the concept of the game, because the humans are wearing modern and casual outfits, we can clarify that the era of this game setting will be 1900+. But why did we make the Puteri Bunian still wearing the outfit from an old tale song. From here, we want to say that humans, as they progress in ages and advancing in technology, we keep upgrading. So, it is the reason why we make humans wear casual outfits. Looking at the Puteri Bunians, we see that they live up to the song, still wearing what the song describes them, because they are keeping the heritage and culture. They are also like humans, advancing in technology and age, but the difference is they didn’t leave the heritage and culture behind.