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Chain Gang

  • Role: Technical Designer

  • Platforms: Windows, macOS, WebGL

  • Team Size: 5

  • Duration: 7 Weeks

  • Responsibilities:

    • Designing and constructing 5 of the 6 levels to be included in the game.

    • Documenting and implementing a tutorial system to introduce players to the game.

    • Brainstorming puzzles and items for use in our levels.

    • Programmed a variety of level components used in the game.

    • Created various smaller pixel art assets.

ChainGang1.png

Game Summary
Chain Gang was a group project from the first class in MSU's Game Minor. In the game you play as a pair of spacemen trying to escape a prison where they were wrongfully imprisoned. The player characters are linked together via a chain which limits their movement and conducts electricity to solve puzzles. This was the first group project of the class and my first attempt at making a fleshed out game, and was incredibly successful for both my team and I. It was awarded Best Game of the nine other games in the running, in addition to Most Fun and Most Playable by our class, our professors, and an external panel of judges.

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Level Design
My primary role at the time was as a level and overall game designer. I designed our tutorial level and levels 1 - 4. My main goal for the level design was to harken back to the puzzle platformer games like Fire Boy and Water Girl or Unravel that I played as a kid and try to recreate that nostalgia, all while creating fun concepts that would highlight our main mechanic; controlling two linked characters. I would start with the chain-linked character as a base and then attempt to think of interesting ways I could have them traverse the levels other than walking. Once I had a "gimmick" for the level, I would sketch the prototype level on paper and then play through it using my finger or some other small object to see if I felt it was fun or would fit the game. I would use the environment to play with that gimmick in different ways, testing the limits of my ideas. I emphasized maintaining constants when testing ideas outside of Unity, which helped me test a whole bunch of game aspects. Once, I had a good base I migrated into Unity and built a prototype of the level with the modular assets we had created. Then the focus moved to play-testing and revising both within the team and with outside help to make the levels as rock-solid as possible. 

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Tutorials
At this point in the project, we had a solid foundation for Chain Gang and we had just started brainstorming ways to effectively introduce the player to the mechanics of our game. The most obvious conclusion we came to was creating a tutorial level with the main focus being on our chain mechanic. Chain Gang is a mixture of two kinds of puzzle-based gameplay; maneuvering two characters chained together and using the chain to connect electrical currents.  With this in mind, I split the tutorial level into two sections each highlighting one of the game aspects before I threw them into the full game. Then, to further solidify communication with the player, I developed an interactable text-box system so the player could clearly read about all the important parts of our game and experiment with them. This strategy worked well leading to our players knowing more about our game before getting into the meat of it and has stuck with me in every game project I've worked on so far. 

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