introduction

This game was built for the 2019 Global Game jam and is the first game I worked on with a team. Our team included Matt O’tousa (programming), Mark Nerys (art), Tristan Damron (programming), Casey Cameron (music & sound). Having all of these bases covered allowed me to focus entirely on game design and level design. This was my first experience working with tools and assets in Unity that were built for the project by other folks. My job was to guide the overall concept, tune the mechanics, build the game’s flow, and design the level layouts. It was a true designer role, and I relished the experience. You can play it on itch using the link below.

gameplay design

Bounce Cushions

We decided on a platformer before the jam started. The jam theme was “home” and we chose a kid for the main character; so it wasn’t too far of a leap to the idea of jumping on couches and beds. This led us to bounce cushions.

I don’t care for bouncy objects in games that change the bounce height based on a jump button input. It never feels right. It’s always a bit inconsistent pulling it off because it’s hard to telegraph when the button was hit correctly while the character is moving around in the air. So the design challenge for me was to make the bounce a consistent height, but also make it fun and different from just a standard jump.

What I figured out is that if you make the bounce slightly higher than the jump — enough to notice a difference but not enough to take the character too far — you can chain these bounces together, and, using level design, can create situations that feel more perilous because the player doesn’t get the opportunity to stop moving. Instead of getting a boost from a seemingly randomly timed button press, they have to rely on timing their movements from platform to platform based on the bounce arc and platform distance. It turns out, having the player try to visualize the highest point of the bounce and react to it — or having them learn to start moving on the ascent rather than the descent — creates enough challenge and variability without an added input. When you add platforms that fall after you bounce on them and a lake of fire, the bounce becomes plenty interesting.

Yo-Yo Fling/Grapple

The Yo-yo went through a lot of changes over the course of the design.

The initial pitch was to have a direct fling. Kind of like the dash in Celeste, but instead of dashing, you would throw out a yo-yo and then zip in a straight line towards and then past it. You would be able to do this in mid-air, and you could essentially cover twice the distance of a dash. This would allow you to fling yourself across long distances but with the added challenge of having to account for the length of the yo-yo and the time it takes to fully extend.

I also made sure we consider the additional challenge of making the yo-yo easy to pick up and understand quickly. Our audience was going to be passersby at a showcase, so I knew people wouldn’t be spending a lot of time with the mechanic when they tried out our game. I wanted to make it graspable and fun as quickly as possible.

We ended up close to this initial pitch, but we tried some other things in the process. We realized through iteration and design exactly what would work and what would not. We tried a yo-yo that would spin you around and fling you over the top. We tried to play with more physics options. We tried a yo-yo whose distance would depend on the pointer’s proximity to the character. But there were always inconsistencies that ran against that “pick up and play” factor, so it kept getting more straight-forward. On the other end of the spectrum, we found it couldn’t fling the character as far or as fast as we initially wanted because it created challenges in the level design where the platforms were too far away to be seen by the player.

What we ended up with is somewhere between a fling and a grapple. Like a grapple, you end up kind of zipping to the point of the yo-yo. But we kept some physics on the other end which let you use the directional buttons to get more or less distance. Unlike a grapple, the yo-yo doesn’t need to attach to anything. It can fling you anywhere you shoot it.

Combining Mechanics

In the end, the goal was to combine the bounce and the fling. Initially, the idea was to use them to climb upwards. It became clear during the level design process that these mechanics worked better for distance traversal rather than height traversal. So the goal transitioned to ramping up over three levels to create a final challenge that would keep the player off of stable ground for long periods of time. This fit well with the narrative of twisted memories becoming more and more surreal over time. The game ended up with a final gauntlet that would see the player bouncing on platforms that fall out of the sky, threading the fling through thin openings, and avoiding a moving wall of fire.

level design

Making the game flow

Our initial design pitch was for three levels. The first level would introduce the bounce, the second the fling, and the third would combine the two for a final test. The idea was for the game, although short, to have a nice flow and feel complete. Initially, the character was going to climb upwards, and at the top of each room would be a door that would take them to another room of the house (living room, then kitchen, then bedroom). Through the course of the project, we realized we didn’t have time to create art for three rooms, so we ended up sticking with one room theme.

I started the rough level layouts moving upwards, but when testing it, I realized that the mechanics didn’t work as well for climbing as they did for traversal. The levels at that point shifted and became more about traversing obstacles and finding secrets.

The final game does, however, still follow our initial concept of flow. The first level gently introduces the bounce mechanic and has a few not-too-perilous jumps over fire, and has an easy-to-find collectible. The second level introduces the fling, but doesn’t require any bouncing. It has a few sections that are a little more dicey and a collectible that requires a little more back-tracking. The third level serves as a final exam of sorts with the addition of falling platforms and orbs that recharge the player’s yo-yo to keep them in the air. The collectible is pretty difficult to find and retrieve, and the whole level ends in a sort of final gauntlet that requires that the player keep moving and combine everything they’ve learned.

The overall goal was to introduce something new with a small tutorial and then spend the rest of the level learning by doing and failing. Then, to compound that design philosophy on the macro level over the course of the whole game.

In order to help support this style of learning, I created a more generous checkpoint system than I might if this were a larger, more polished project. I wanted to compel folks to keep going when they fail since they would be playing in short bursts at a showcase or on a chance download. Our goal was to make it hard, but if I made it too hard for its scope and projected audience, no one would want to finish. By making it hard but making the checkpoints forgiving, I found that folks would keep going up against a tough area over and over. That is exactly the reaction I wanted out of a project of this scale.

You can see an example of this working in this Let’s Play by Furious Panda.

Some Bonus level design Mechanics

• We added a collectible system to the game to encourage players to explore the corners and to play again if they missed one. It also feels good for the player to see a number going up.

• Late in the process, I was finding that level three was missing something to set it apart as the final challenge, so we added some falling platforms and a yo-yo recharge mechanism that would keep you in the air a little longer. There’s a gauge in the bottom-right corner that shows the availability of the yo-yo. I made it big so it would flash in the corner of the player’s eye, but don’t think it works. It’s still too far away from the character. If I had more time I might have attached it to the character somehow.

• For the final gauntlet, I wanted to create an additional sense of urgency for the player beyond the temporary platforms, so I added a moving wall of fire. It doesn’t move that quickly, and so doesn’t pose too much of a threat, but I made sure the player sees it when they start and that’s enough to make them panic a little. That’s also the origin of my personal favorite bit, the mountain of chairs, which I built in order to force the player to stay in one place for a short time and give the wall a chance to catch up.

Conclusion / Takeaways

It would be impossible for me to cover everything this experience taught me in brevity here. This is my first team project and the first project on which I didn’t have to worry about art or programming (although I did do a little of both) and could really just focus on design. This was also my first ever Game Jam and that taught me a lot about scoping for 48 hours. I learned the amount of work that goes into laying out level designs. I learned that working with a team and having support is indispensable.

It’s amazing how much a project can change over time. Iteration is a necessary part of game development, but for a project with such a constrained timeline, one wonders at the start how much room for iteration there is. Well comparing the original layouts and mechanics to where they are now, it’s clear that most of the time on any game project, no matter the size, no matter the scope, no matter the team, will go to iterating and refining, even if that means having to redo things multiple times.

I also learned the importance of play testing. After the showcase, to which I thought I had brought what would be basically the final build, I ended up going back and re-laying out parts of level one again in a different way. I learned that it just wasn’t working for a lot of people, and I knew that I wanted to get people to the yo-yo, because that’s where things really pick up.

I know this is a small game that only took a few weeks of my life, but it’s my first completed project working on a team, and I am really proud of what we put together. Thanks to Matt O’tousa (programming), Mark Nerys (art), Tristan Damron (programming), Casey Cameron (music & sound) for all your help on this fun little platformer.