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Advent
ROLE
Game Designer, Gameplay Designer, Level Designer, Environment Artist, UI Artist, and VFX Artist.
DESCRIPTION
MAU was my Game Design and Development 200 team and I's project. Its a 2D puzzle platformer about a mummified cat reawakening to collect its missing lives in order to join its master in the afterlife. Explore through a nonlinear Egyptian pyramid, encounter unique enemies, solve fun puzzles, and make it to the top to be judged and deemed worthy to enter the afterlife. MAU has multiple endings based on the number of lives collected by the end of the game. It also was built with speed running in mind.
YEAR
2020-When Its Ready
GENRE
Voxel Based Sandbox Survival and Exploration Game
PLATFORM
PC on Steam, Xbox, and Playstation
Game Design
MAU was made to be a puzzle platformer with a total of 9 levels with no loading screens.
MAU was made to be a puzzle platformer with a total of 9 levels with no loading screens.
Concept to Final Product
Challenges
The concept of MAU was pitched by my classmate and team leader Sarah Ziebarth at our classes pitch session when picking games to develop. It started as puzzle based mummy cat game with the idea of collecting its body parts as you progress.
I at the time was pitching my game called Soul-Lo where you played as a frail spirit possessing enemies to use them to do puzzles and fight/platform through levels. A lot of my ideas of player interaction and the health mechanics of MAU came from early concepts of Soul-Lo. Both games had similarities which allowed me to work extremely well in the team and fine tune the gameplay and heart of the game.
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The game from pitch had very little direction at first. Puzzles and platformers have all been done before and they are fairly broad. I took the idea of collecting body parts and ran with the idea of collecting the 9 lives of the dead cat as you go through the game. This allowed for players to self scale and by making the core idea around health the level design could really excel at making the game feel fun yet difficult where the player picks their difficulty.
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Scope and Development Time
Challenges
MAU is a puzzle platformer with a total of 9 core rooms with many interconnecting hallways. The scope of the game was ambitious from the start due to wanting unique puzzles and mechanics in an exploration heavy game. However, it all was completed and presented at the Stout Game Expo in Spring 2022.
The time we had to make MAU was less than 5 months. We also only had a team of 3 artists and 2 coders to make the game a reality. Given that I pushed for a more modular design model due to my previous experience making Minecraft resource packs.
I took up many art and design roles since our team was so small. I designed Gameplay, Levels, Tiles, Environments, Water, Fire, Foliage, Interactables, Ground Clutter, UI, Custom Font, and Menus.
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Relaxed but Tactical
Challenges
MAU was made to be a fun easy going game where players explore and navigate through a pyramid. We knew from the start that we wanted it to be challenging at parts in different ways such as parkour and puzzles. With the idea that it gets harder as you get higher in the pyramid.
We wanted speed running to be something that players could do if they chose to. Not all 9 lives are required to end the game, but all 9 lives are required to get the good ending. That way players can play how they would like and still feel rewarded.
Making a game feel hard to some and easy to others is a hard task to fulfill. However, by making heath acquirable it gives us freedom to design levels in a way where difficulty scales based off of player choice and progression.
Wooden Spikes for example do 1 life of damage. That can kill you at 1 life. However, the more lives you have the less things hurt which gives the player a sense of power. By progression standards trap and enemy frequency increases in higher areas which counter balances the higher expected health players might have by that point. This also makes speed running with low health more challenging and rewarding for those who want the challenge.
A One Level game
Challenges
MAU was made to have NO loading screens from the beginning and as a group we made that core to the game. We felt that loading screens did not work well with our idea of non linear progression moving up and that it would cause more confusion than not.
One level is a lot to load all the time given all of our layers and assets we have. To make our "One Level Game" we used collision checks to unload and load levels to reduce strain on the computer and still keep our smooth gameplay.
We used GitHub for main file transfer. However, due to working on one large Level to keep our core rule of no loading screens it caused some conflicts when multiple people were working in Unity. We came up with the solution to use Prefabs to design levels and then import the prefabs into the main level so we can all work on multiple parts at the same time to maximize our efficiency.
Gameplay Design
Challenges
Gameplay Loop
The gameplay loop of MAU was about ascending the pyramid to reach the top. Players could do it at their own pace or at any life total they want. Not all rooms need to be visited or abilities acquired.
The goal was to make the game accessible to a large amount of people. With many things players enjoy such as the various types of puzzles.
Making a game so open and scalable always has issues of identity and difficulty, but due to how MAU was designed at its core those common issues are not as prevalent. Scaling health and non-linear map design helps elevate difficulty issues and better tailors it to individuals. The classic Egyptian iconography helps it retain its identity and also helps player's emersion with sounds and music that change as you go through rooms.
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Challenges
Life Mechanic
MAU's Life System is the centermost aspect of the game. Acquiring lives is the main goal which in of itself makes exploration vital. However, the system cleverly is also the difficulty scaling factor as well as the win condition.
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Players start the game with only 1 life and gain empty lives upon collecting the glowing hearts found around the pyramid. The Bastet statues are used as respawn anchors, checkpoints, room resets, and ways to fill back up empty lives.
Lives are a form of protection or cushion players can collect and are encouraged to collect. They also are placed in a way to guide players through areas with visuals and through audio.
The number of lives players end the game with effect the ending animation that shows all the player's lives swirling around them. A player needs all 9 lives to get the good ending and any less than the 9 and the player will receive the bad ending.
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Challenges
Difficulty Scaling
MAU difficulty is up to the player. Levels are designed to be moderately difficult in different ways. Some players might find parkour harder than puzzles and vise versa. The life aspect also makes levels have varying difficulty, but MAU was never meant to be a "Hard" game.
Due to the nature of non linear games, rooms cannot be exceedingly more difficult than previous rooms since players can go in many different directions. Instead, I came up with having puzzles and parkour with similar difficulty in different areas of difficulty. For example, switching levers in correct combinations is in a different area of difficulty than doing parkour. By having difficulty in various areas like this it makes the game feel fluid and branching instead of harsh and steep with difficulty changes. It accounts for players being different with strengths and weaknesses and uses that to also scale the game accordingly in a very clean manor.
Challenges
Menu, Dialog, and Room Names
MAU's Menus were designed to be clear, consistent, and stylized. Each menu has its menu name in the top center, quit button at the bottom right, and resume button in the top right. The buttons on the menus would also glow bright blue when moused over. The Pause Menus also display the player's total collected Lives and Abilites they collected.
The brightness menu has its own secondary menu with a framed view to see the in-game effects of the brightness slider.
Dialog and Room Names were made to clearly guide the player and explain key information without creating cut scenes or breaks in emersion.
I made a custom MAU font in Illustrator for the game to keep its stylized feel. However, due to limitations on the coding side with making a font script I had to place every letter and symbol in every Menu, Button, Dialog, and Room Name which took a very large amount of time.
I organized the menus in such a way that the layout feels balanced and clear to players. All the important information is not hidden and things they might not have been keeping track of are displayed accordingly.
We as a group felt that a mini map would ruin the exploration feel of the game and break emersion, so we decided on a room name format where as rooms would load in the name of the room would be displayed to give a player a sense of direction without spoiling areas to come and clutter the screen.
Level Design
Game Layout
Challenges
MAU was designed using a room by room method with 3 central levels as it goes higher in a pyramid shape. We wanted multiple hallways connecting to rooms to give players options when exploring. As the player would ascend they would have less horizontal exploration to incentivize going up more often. We decided on this to keep the tringle feel even if the rooms when put together do not make an exact triangle. The in game feeling of having less rooms horizontally as they get higher up applies this effect.
It is important to me that the game felt as free as possible even though the player is trapped in a tomb. Player exploration is something I value a ton and having that "Ooooooo" moment when a player sees something for the first time is what I wanted to capture in my levels. I made sure each room and hallway was different and had something worth exploring for.
The way I designed the game layout came from research on what actual Egyptian tombs looked like. I took a lot of inspiration from them in environment design and the way platforming worked. I expanded them to be more exaggerated and scaled to the size of a cat. I wanted that feeling that a cat was climbing around messing with things and knocking stuff over. That design philosophy can be easily seen in how rooms mimic areas cats could be in real life and how they would maneuver them.
Laying out the levels in a pyramid shape led to some issues size wise due to making sure the player couldn't see through upcoming areas they were not supposed to see yet.
Having a player zoom mechanic mixed with how we wanted the game to feel like a tomb led us to making very thick walls and using elevators to bring the character higher up to get around players seeing through walls.
Given my very limited time to make art assets as well as create the game itself I had to use my time extremely well. I took this into account when making the art pieces and made them to be used in many ways. I made a few types of materials to use in special areas as well as sets of general purpose level building blocks. I designed the levels to be modular and be tile based to make the most of the little time I had while still keeping the quality I wanted for the game.
If you look very closely you barely can tell that the rocks and some other assets found around the game all come from a set of 10 or so variants that I edited in Unity to cut down on asset cost and time to make in order to maximize the use of each and every asset I created. This method kept the quality I wanted and made our game environments the most engaging out of the other games at SGX 2022.
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Progression Layout
Challenges
Progression in MAU is centered around acquiring lives and abilities. However, it is designed in a way where not every single heart is needed in order to complete the game. We wanted players to choose their own path and explore the way they want while still having plenty of gameplay options and rooms to explore.
The heath mechanic I made was designed to drive exploration, create a difficulty system, provide room for speed run potential, and give multiple players experiences that suit their play style.
Making a game where the main draw is exploration, puzzles, and platforming can make games lose their focus on goals. Early on in development it was difficult to figure out how to find a balance where exploration is natural when the main goal is up to the player. This led to my health mechanic and how lives are collected at the player's pace which inherently scale the rooms to them.
In the beginning I had numerous ideas about having many collectible abilities around the game to reward exploration and lead to more ways to solve puzzles. However, due to time constraints and the already large scope most of it was cut due to our limited development time. My ability concepts however became key models for our 2 collectible abilities the Hiss stun and the Double Jump.
Room Design
Challenges
Each room is MAU has a theme and set of enemies and mechanics based around it. We wanted each area to be worth exploring and to have a similar feel level design wise, but still slightly different where each room can be easily distinguished and tied to the room name very easily.
We decided on rooms having 1 core puzzle/platforming element and 1 or 2 hazards depending on how high up the room was. This gave us room to keep consistent gameplay wise and introduce new things while not overwhelming the player.
Another thing we focused heavily on was room order. We knew that some players would struggle more in certain areas than others naturally. So, knowing that we staggered platforming and puzzle levels fairly where heavy movement based levels led into thinking based levels more often than not. This gave players breaks while also time to improve their skills between rooms.
Making each room with a theme was hard to do in such a little amount of time. This was a lot coding and art wise. Making content that fit everywhere as well as content that only was in one room wasn't an easy task. However, we did it through careful planning and listing features we wanted and how they would work early on. This level of planning allowed us to consistently pump out content that fit right in where we wanted it.
I put a lot of thought into laying out where rooms should be. Since not only are rooms designed for themselves, but the rooms around them as well and how they connect. The Shifting Crypt room for example had locking wall puzzles with moving walls. It was hard to connect with since players coming from the other side had to be able to do the puzzle in reverse.
Projected player health, abilities the player could access, and checkpoint statue locations all played a massive role in how I designed and laid out rooms so that they would function and fit well within our nonlinear style. For example, the last two rooms before the final area require the player to have the double jump to finish the game. We designed each of the 3 core tiers of the pyramid to have at least one ability that the player would need to progress higher up in order to drive exploration even further.
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Hallway Design
Challenges
Hallways were made with low ceilings and in various shapes to give a stark contrast to rooms. These spaces were designed to be for brief breaks in between complex room gameplay. They also functioned as interesting level design where hallways led into very interesting parts of other rooms which gave players what I call the "Indiana Jones Effect." Its the idea that small offshoots and interesting areas out of the way give players the want to explore more often. Having hallways between every room makes each one feel special and really nails the feeling we were going for.
Hallways were at times harder to design than most rooms. They acted as the glue that kept the player moving. That being said I didn't want them to be boring to go through. I made each hallway have a story and bits that led into the rooms near it. I used ground clutter systematically to furher give the feeling of unique areas by having areas have more of certain clutter and some have unique clutter to it. For example, the Litterbox room and the hallways leading to it are the only places where bones are present as ground clutter. It adds soft narrative as well as implied lore that the player discovers and then is used by them as visual landmarks to aid in navigation.
Advent Assets
Here are some of my favorite pictures from the live game. Art wise I was responsible for creating all the Tiles, Platforms, Traps, Ground Clutter, Wall Art, Foliage, Menus, Custom Font, Dialog, Room Names, as well as the Fire and Water Effects.
More examples of my work on MAU can be found on the MAU Artwork Page in the Art Gallery shown below. There I walk through my processes and challenges when designing artwork for the game.
Art Assets
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