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Chain Gang

  • Role: Technical Designer

  • Status: Published

  • Team Size: 5

  • Duration: 7 Weeks

  • Platforms: Windows, macOS, WebGL

  • 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.

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

    • Creating various smaller pixel art assets.

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Game Summary
 In Chain Gang 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 can conduct electricity to solve puzzles. The player controls both players at the same time and must switch between them to platform around the levels, all the while avoiding enemies and traps. Chain Gang was the first attempt at making a fleshed out game for my team and I, and it turned out to be incredibly successful. It was awarded Best Game, in addition to Most Fun and Most Playable of the nine other games in the running.

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Level Design
My primary role for Chain Gang was as a level designer, but I also contributed to most other areas of design. I designed and implemented our tutorial level, levels 1 - 4, and a slew of interactables, traps, and enemies. My goal for the level design was to harken back to the puzzle platformer games like Fire Boy and Water Girl and Unravel. I wanted to incorporate similar fun environmental puzzles while creating level concepts that would highlight our main mechanic; controlling two linked characters. Each level had a "gimmick", usually based on ways the player could traverse our game. I mapped each level out on paper and played through them using a small cutout player, testing what felt right. 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 were 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. 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. 

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