Milo Maul
A foddian style puzzle platformer where the user plays as a sentient Maul trying to go about its day. The goal of the game is to travel to your store and open up for the day while avoiding breaking anything and helping people along the way. This project took place over the spawn of two weeks. A team of me and 3 others created a group to compete in a Game Jam where the goal was to create a game with the theme “You are the Weapon”.
My Work
In Milo Maul, my primary focus was leading in Level Design. I drew out blueprints and all the moving components that I would need in order to create a fun and engaging platformer, incorporating the unique top heavy balancing system we created for the game. This posed an interesting challenge to my designs and layouts because even simple puzzles and tasks could be made strenuous due to the unstable nature of the character model. This forced me to take a different approach to the design, carefully balancing difficulty so as not to step over into tediousness.
My secondary work involved using Blender and Unity’s in-game engine for creating a number of assets for the game’s environment to populate the world. The goal was to create a keep the world’s aesthetic in mind while working on assets, allowing for a more simple polygonal design outlook. The difficulty in the work came from making sure that the assets would shatter into multiple pieces when the object was hit.
Lastly, I created the Design Document that allowed us to summarize our project. It details the different aspects of the game so that a reader is able to understand the basics of the game at a glance.
What I Learned
I don’t usually work in Unity, so working on this game was a good refresher of the engine and how it functions in comparison to Unreal Engine. I greatly enjoyed the challenge of factoring in the character’s unstable nature into the design and fine tuning the different aspects of the map to compliment the balancing mechanic. Creating puzzles that could be solved with enough experience but still posed a challenge was a unique test that I was happy to work through. The time constraint also created a factor of “what level designs are feasible for me to create and build out and what designs are pushing my time window too far” which I was welcome to work through.