PROJECTS
The game is called SkyJellies, and it will be a foundation for a free, decentralized virtual world.
There are more than a hundred volunteers collaborating to make SkyJellies a reality.
POST MORTEM:
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In this project I learned about working together with larger teams, and how to communicate effectively. As a Game Designer, part of your job is to make sure that everyone making the game understands the vision and how their work builds towards that common goal.
That was made even harder because we worked as a volunteer team, and albeit we did have a lot of regulars, most of the team members were rotating a lot.
To mitigate that, I made a lot of meetings with programmers to make sure that our features were well planned. I recommend doing flowcharts of the features and showing it to the developers, that way they can really understand your system and what needs to be coded. Also, since devs are very logical, they are very good at poking holes in your systems to make sure your features are well defined.
P1 is a Open Collective were volunteers from around the world are working together to make a game.
BOMBATIDA
Bombatida is a game about kids playing with toy cars, using whatever they have lying around to create a course. Through the power of imagination, these levels come to live and become larger than life arenas for a epic battle to unravel.
POST MORTEM:
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The simplicity of a gameplay loop is a very powerful thing. In this project, iteration was key to get the core experience feeling satisfying, so I did a lot of tuning and balancing for the cars. After testing, we implemented a drift system to give the player more control of were they wanted to go.
I got a chance to really dig deep into Level Design, using Pro Builder to do grayboxing. What I learned was, keep your levels interesting but simple.
I remember that I did a level that I was very proud of, it had 3 floors, different ways to access them and I felt like it was awesome. But when we tested, it just didn't worked. It was too hard to scan the level and go were you wanted to go admist the chaos of the matches, and we ended up scratching it.
What we came up with was a map that was half the size of the older version and it was way more fun to play. Keep it simple folks!
UMBRA AND THE CELESTIAL INVASION
Play as Umbra, a shadow being that needs to fend off a invasion of celestial creatures. Solve puzzles and fight your way to freedom.
POST MORTEM:
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Umbra is by far the most complex game I made. We designed a lot of mechanics for puzzle and combat that interact with each other to create emergent gameplay.
The real challenge with this one was how to teach the player the rules of the game. We wanted the player to experiment, but there were some mechanics that we should have taught in a more direct way.
For instance, your character can turn into a shadow. In that state, he moves faster and can't take damage. But we didn't have a way to show this to the player, so most of them assumed that this shadow state was for running faster only.
We ended up having to create a new level on the tutorial where the player can't pass a obstacle without turning into a shadow to avoid damage.