Near Site
This is my first commercial release. Near Site is a survival horror game where you are severely near sighted. Each level will have a set of missions, puzzles, items, & a monster hunting you down. The main inspiration for this game is that I myself am severely near sighted & have a love of haunted houses as well as stealth games.
Genre: Survival Horror, Puzzle
Engine: Unity
Key Design Points
The monsters and their abilities are designed in such a way that it's difficult to see them without glasses. For instance, the forest monster is green and blends in very well.
Health is tied to your glasses. Without glasses, one hit will kill you. With glasses, depending on durability, you can take at least one additional hit before dying.
You will be able to pick up items to repair/craft glasses.
Clues scattered around the area will be incredibly difficult to read without glasses.
Interactable items will not highlight if you don't have glasses on.
You don't HAVE to kill the monster to progress. If you want to, there is an unlisted side quest and some puzzles that you will have to discover in order to trap and/or kill the monster hunting you. This will remove them from the level, making exploration less stressful.
Post Mortem Lesson (thus far…): Purpose
One of the trickier design ideas that have bled into other parts of the game has been the player’s glasses. The concept of having glasses has been tied to player health since the beginning but it never really made sense to just FIND a pair of specs in the wild. Initially I floated having a crafting system to create glasses as an inventory item. While this would have worked, I was having trouble figuring out a way to make the system reusable for more than just glasses.
SOLUTION:
The idea was to expand upon the vision concept, add a breath mechanic, and change the crafting system to a repair/upgrade system. The player will always have the same pair of glasses. They can repair, temporarily boost or upgrade a set of glasses with salvaged items.
The breath mechanic is a kind of player triggered stamina system that has the player hold their breath to prevent sound, allow under water movement, & stop breath from being visible or steaming up your lenses under certain conditions.
As for vision, your glasses can be effected by mud, water, steam, or even scratched. This would provide the need for repair, upgrades, and special lens coating in order to remedy or prevent these “status” ailments.
Neon Night Lights
This was our submission for the Admix Spring 2022 Game Jam in April. The theme was "Urban" & we won 2nd place! It's a simple Pac-Man/Tron-esque game where you collect enough "Energon" to power the conduits throughout the city in order to restore power. My partner and I hammered this out in a day and a half! Music compliments of the very talented Javier DeCarli.
Genre: Arcade
Engine: Unity
Key Design Points
The aesthetic was important to adhere to the "Urban" theme.
Time limit was added to provide a sense of urgency & encourage optimizing routing decisions.
Each conduit requires a different amount of Energon to trigger. While not explicitly stated how much is needed, audio feedback indicated insufficient Energon. Sufficient Energon activates it's tethered city block(s) and deducts the amount from current Energon storage.
Adaptive audio was added based on level progress which helps build suspense.
Post Mortem Lesson: Scope
The biggest challenge with this project was scope. Not only did my team mate and I have just 3 days to complete, but we both worked during half the time of the game jam, making our schedule even tighter. How does one come up with an Urban themed game in less than 3 days?
SOLUTION:
Ultimately we decided to not reinvent the wheel (too much) & delegate tasks to our strengths. Pac-Man was the primary mechanic we were going for except instead of running from ghosts, you were running against the clock. The idea was to use a car or bike model but we nixed that for basic geometric shapes wrapped in emission textures. That ended up looking fantastic with a bloom post processing effect. I created a single city block which could be replicated quickly to build levels. Top it off with Javier’s burst of musical inspiration and a solid start for an adaptive audio system and we build 3 vertical slice levels in 12 hrs.
Ret:Roller 443
This was my solo submission for Brackey's Game Jam 2020.2. The theme was "Rewind" and took approximately 6.5 days to complete. I incorporated elements of rewind throughout via the aesthetic, gameplay goal, and even a game mechanic. It was my first game jam. I placed 255th over all (out of 1830 submission ~ top 15%).
Fun Fact: a C90 cassette would generally have 443 feet of tape!
Genre: Arcade, Mobile
Engine: Unity
Key Design Points
Clicking the pencils will rewind the cassette. Finish rewinding to complete the level.
Clicking the scissors will damage the cassette. Damage it 3 times and you lose.
Click the digital clock to charge up "Rewind" ability. Rewind moves all objects back along their path for a short time. Then they just drop in order to launch across the screen again.
Each time you complete a level, you unlock that level's audio track in the Tape Deck!
The post processing effects were adjusted in such a way that they will progressively work against you as the levels progress: glitching, static, chromatic aberration, etc...
Added a special....."easter egg" after beating the 3rd level.
Post Mortem Lesson: Theming
I wanted this game to EMBODY the concept of Rewind. Everything had to be associated with it SOMEHOW whether it was obvious, subtle, or an inside reference for myself. Even the name had to have some kind of rewind reference.
SOLUTION:
I did exactly what I set out to do, ensuring that the Rewind theme permeated in as many spaces of the game as possible. The name Ret:Roller 443 has retro hidden in it. 443 is a reference to the length of tape in a cassette. The goal of the game is to click pencils to rewind an ethereal cassette (if you know you know). The aesthetic itself is a rewind to the neon 80’s. The ITEMS you click is a rewind to school days (pencils, scissors, and a digital clock). You have a rewind ability in stage 3 that literally rewinds time. You unlock stage audio tracks when you beat them. Lemme tell you….those amazing audio tracks are something you will be coming back to listen to even if you don’t care for the game. Finally the concept itself goes back to the first “game” I made that involved levels drawn on paper where you use a pencil to poke holes in the stage akin to an FPS. Obscure personal reference, but it was a source of inspiration.
Drill Man Concept
This is a concept game that I designed together with my 10 year old son. We brain stormed & scoped the ideas together, generated a paper cut out concept to test the ideas out, then ultimately put it together in Unity. Music is provided courtesy of Nathan Froehlich.
Genre: Platformer, Puzzle
Engine: Unity
Key Design Points
The game is designed so you always move down. You cannot, as a rule, be able to jump back up a tier after you drill down.
You can only drill down.
Collect as many gems as you can.
You are limited to how many blocks you can drill via your fuel level.
Each level has different paths, generating a different number of gems. The goal is to find the optimal path within fuel limits to maximize your gems by the end of the level.
Post Mortem Lesson: Prototyping
The final level design in this vertical slice is not what my son and I initially conceived. Had we gone with that iteration, the game would have been broken from the start. Why didn’t it end that way?
SOLUTION:
I wanted to create a prototype made out of paper cut outs for my son to do some play testing to see if he even liked the idea he came up with. So we drew a first draft stage, cut out some gems, and a player. We determined an arbitrary amount of starting fuel and away he went. While he was playing around we discovered that not only was our stage design flawed, but the amount of starter fuel could leave the player stranded. You could also accidentally backtrack in one spot (we decided you can jump 2 squares. Most places were too high except for one area I miss-sketched). But most importantly, my son didn’t find it fun initially. “Why am I doing this?” As a result, we had to step back in order to re-evaluate the goal we wanted the player to pursue. All this from taking the time to quickly prototype before writing a single line of code.