Inkly

Each team member easily fit into a select team role. We didn't have a dedicated artist, but my background in vector art and Adobe Illustrator would be enough to get the game to a deliverable state. My desire for level design experience landed me the role of Level Designer. We wanted to develop an experience reminiscent of both puzzle games and side-scrolling runners. The final concept we decided upon used the CMYK color scheme as a vehicle to create color-mismatching puzzle experiences.

Our design was straightforward; we wanted to push the player through a fixed level that doubled as a color puzzle. Our core mechanic revolved around changing the color of the background, which by proxy changed the tangibility of the colored platforms required to traverse the level. We would challenge the player with a perpetually moving scenario.

We intended to preserve visual clarity, since the colors and the moving scene would be rapidly changing. I opted to create solid platforms by blocking out rectangles in cyan, magenta, and yellow. Creating the 'invisible' platforms was a little more difficult. I could not simply make the platforms invisible, since the obscured information would lead to player frustration. I settled on a bevelled dotted outline in order to both mark the positions of the platforms and to visually enhance the corners to show the player exactly where to land and what colors to swap to.

Our current tools were merely platforms, but we wanted to take that a bit farther. I had laid out a series of jumping challenges on a horizontal axis, give or take some verticality. However, there were many instances where players could hover on one color for too long, making huge jumps between the solid platforms and ignoring the color swap mechanic. In response, I introduced colored spike walls to break up the pacing, which forced players to address the color swap mechanic as a necessary tool for the completion of the game.

Our scope was naturally smaller than desired, but mandatory. Our final product exceeded expectations. Overall, the game was generally liked by our players and instructors for trying to stand out from the crowd. One playtester even commented on the difficulty of the game being akin to Dark Souls - difficult, but beatable through persistence and skill. My magnum opus was a level that took me two hours of retries to beat due to the timing challenges and the hardcore depth I was able to create with the few puzzle pieces I had.