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Ecorealm

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

2021-When Its Ready

GENRE

Deck Building Collectable Strategy Card 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.




 

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. 

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.