Tirta

Full Development

Full Development

Tirta

Set in a fantasy world inspired by Balinese culture, Tirta is a puzzle-adventure game where you wield water to manipulate the environment, traverse ancient ruins, and defeat corrupted horrors to restore the river’s flow and reunite the Mountain with the Sea.

Gameplay

Play Video

Art Portfolio

Objective

The Agate team built Tirta to break the common mold of games based on Western or Eastern fantasy. Tirta brings a fresh setting inspired by Bali’s natural landscape, ancient architecture, character design, and water spirituality. We play as the Dancer, who was bestowed power by the Sea to manipulate water. This enables her to perform a variety of actions, from traversing ancient ruins to puzzle-solving to fighting giant enemies, and ultimately reunite the Sea with her estranged soulmate, the Mountain.

Strength

Minimum Input, Flashy Output
Tirta is an accessible action adventure game, player shouldn't be required to perform high technical play in order to produce flashy gameplay.

Water Shows the Way
Purposeful design focusing on water narrative allows player to follow water visuals to discover gameplay elements and reorient direction.

Simple Story, Multiple Interpretation
Tirta tells of a hero’s journey through strong visual narrative rooted in Balinese mysticism. By bringing real-world themes of human’s effects on nature, the narrative of Tirta is alien yet familiar at once.

Challenge & Solution

Challenge
Bringing Indonesian Identity to the World

Solution
Uniquely Balinese art direction, universal narrative themes, simple gameplay, and minimalist dialogue allow players to relate to the world of Tirta and be mesmerized by Indonesian culture without needing prior understanding.

Team Composition

Responsible for overseeing the overall project from research, pre-production, production and delivery based on the agreed timeline.

Design, and integrate all game components such as gameplay, audio, UI, Tech Art, Video Effects.

Responsible for creating all the design assets used in the game including Art and style concept, UI/UX research, developing the environment and 3D properties, character modelling art, video effect, light and technology art.

Workflow

Ideation

As VR was still considered a novelty back then, Agate were exploring the possibility it might offer as crowd attractor for on-ground event activations.

Pre-Production

The development of Pasien Terakhir started with pre-production stage, where we researched the purpose of the game. Designed as a crowd activation game, we came up with several technical requirements. For example, a short completion time. A game session in Pasien Terakhir was designed to be finished in less than 5 minutes, to allow people to take turns playing. The story should be interesting and should trigger visceral reactions like jumps and screams, in order to draw the crowd’s attention.

Production

We designed everything from gameplay and interface to be simple, to allow both gamer and non-gamer to play and to enhance the immersion. We build the game on Unreal Engine, using Blender and Substance to create the 3D art assets. After the initial game was finished, we did several rounds of user testing and reiterations. From the initial ideation stage to wrapping up, Pasien Terakhir only took 1 month of development