MAU
PRIMARY ROLES
-Game Designer
-Level Designer
-Gameplay Designer
-Environment Artist
SECONDARY ROLES
-Systems Designer
-Game Balancer
-Font Designer
-UI Designer
DESCRIPTION
MAU was my Game Design and Development 200 team project. It's 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 was also built with speed running in mind.
RESPONSIBILITIES
• Create and maintain the art style of the game through asset creation.
• Designed and created all Platforms, Traps, Ground Clutter, Wall Art, Foliage, Menus, Custom Font, Dialog, Room Names, and Fire and Water VFX for Unity 2D.
• Designed and planned out the core systems, gameplay features, and gameplay loop.
• Designed and built the central game layout, Tutorial, and Litterbox Levels.
• Worked collaboratively in a Small Agile team.
• Led game balancing and user experience.
• Came up with the central Life mechanic and playstyle.
• Documented my design and artistic processes.
• Used GitHub for the project repository.
• Finished MAU on time for launch on Itch.IO and the Student Game Expo (SGX 2022) where it was nominated for "Best Game Art."
• Presented the game live at the Stout Game Expo 2022.
YEAR
2022
GENRE
Exploration Puzzle Platformer
PLATFORM
Made in Unity for PC and Web and Published on Itch.IO
Game Design
Concept to Final Product
Challenges
The concept of MAU was pitched by my classmate and team leader Sarah Ziebarth at our class's pitch session when picking games to develop. It started as a 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.
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. By making the core idea around health this allowed level design to also scale with the player, 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. It all was completed and presented at the Stout Game Expo in Spring 2022.
