Project Type: Solo
Technology Stack: Unity, Aseprite
Role: Game Designer, Programmer
GitHub: Elevator Hero
Prototyping and Game Design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vin7c2Lf1Uc
Demo
Description
Project made from scratch in 2 months, inspired by an 80s arcade game called “Elevator Action”. One of the important objectives was to implement the concept using different approaches such as iterative design and “hat” feedback strategy.
Development of concept I have started with paper prototyping and testing different mechanics by using vertical and horizontal game slice approaches. After each iteration, I applied new ideas and mechanics to the prototype in order to make it more interesting and check if potential players would think the same. As the result of such concept development, I got a game view which helps to understand aspects that need to be done, playtested or designed.
Besides common features such as audio manager, menu, and tutorial level, the following advanced features were implemented:
- Score and Highscore Table (with encryption to minimize high score hacking)
- Portals and Elevator systems
- Entity Spawn Management
To Improve
As usually there are things to improve and polish, but this time I found the following items that might be improved:
- Game lore – as the game has a hidden story, the player needs to know about it
- Controls – Elevator controls should be merged with movement to get rid of using additional keys
- Proper enemy AI – 2D nav mesh agent is bad
- Animations – some animations conflict with each other and do not run as intended
- Level Design and Camera – some levels are hard to understand because of the static camera size
- Code Logic – even though I tried to use MVP and MV models to separate logic from view, my implementation lacks correct dependency injection