Randy's Twisted Trash Temple
Randy's Twisted Trash Temple is a 3rd person puzzle platformer where you play as Randy jumping your way through dimensions and launching pillars with your big tail to escape his way to find treasures of the twisted trash temple he is trapped in.
Randy's Twisted Trash Temple was my first major project on a team. I worked on this project while at the University of Utah in my Traditional Game Development class. The purpose of this project was to have your first experience making a full game on a team and experiencing the full pipeline during the semester of four months. This team had a total of five people on it. For this project I was the lead designer and it was my first experience being a designer. Our team decided to make our game focus on a core mechanic of 2D to 3D movement swap. We wanted to take reference from older games from our childhood with iconic animal main characters and cartoonish stylized look and feel.
Goals
● Learn from your first experience of the game development pipeline
● Develop skills working on a team
● Learn the Godot engine
● Learn how to use Github
● Develop a puzzle platformer with:
○ A core 2D-3D swap mechanic
○ Cartoon art style and game feel
Player Design
Our team wanted to make our player feel very reminiscent of those older games. We had settled on the idea of an Indiana Jones style raccoon character. We wanted the character to have our character's movement feel stylized and sort of floaty like games we remembered from our childhood. We developed some basic movement for both our 2D and 3D versions of our character with a basic jump. And then we developed a tail spin which would double as our interact as well as an ability you could use mid air to extend your air time.
After our first playtest we realized quickly that our jump felt strange. We decided that it was because you would go up much too fast and come down much too slowly. We also were getting complaints from our play testers that the game was too difficult and the jumps were too hard. Our controls were also unintuitive because our camera controls were on the arrow keys and our up and down were inverted.
I quickly fixed the inputs to be more intuitive and also developed a shadow under our character when the player jumped to help show where the player would land. I had hoped this would make the game feel less difficult and frustrating.
Gameplay Design
For our gameplay we wanted it to focus mainly on platforming between our 2D and our 3D spaces. We had developed crystals that the player could hit with their tail to swap between the spaces. This was our core mechanic and with it we wanted to add some additional features that would add to our temple feel. after our first playtest we quickly added checkpoints in the form of track cans and then we discussed secondary mechanics. We debated having vines to climb or levers to pull with doors to open. Potentially traps or pushable blocks for puzzles.
We ended up deciding on pushable block puzzles. It would add to the temple puzzle theme we were looking for and it also would allow for us to reuse our tail spin attack for the interaction. We prototyped a few different functionalities for the blocks. We decided on having them be on ice tiles, and when the player would hit the blocks they would travel as far as they could on the ice tiles.
One of the main reasons we decided to go with pushable blocks is I believed that having 2D platforming sections on the walls of the pushable blocks could lead to lots of interesting sections and level designs. The blocks could be pushed to complete sections of 2D platforming or serve as platforms for sections. With these two core mechanics I felt our game could have very interesting levels.
The final thing we added to our game was coins. I had found that I wanted to have hidden areas and branching paths to make our level design more interesting and to add to our overall temple exploring fantasy however there was no motivation for players exploring other areas. To resolve this we added coins and placed them around the level to motivate and guide the player throughout our level.
Level Design
The first attempt at level design for this project I made many mistakes. After watching our first playtest it was clear that the way I had set up our level was very frustrating and punishing. The jumps were not friendly to those inexperienced with platformers, the unintuitive controls didn't help, the lack of coyote time and player shadow made jumps unforgiving, and the way I had set up the level was very punishing without checkpoints implemented.
Quickly I set out to try to resolve as many of these issues as I could. I learned a lot about how you need to scope levels and their difficulty.
After adding checkpoints and player shadow, fixing the inputs, and redesigning the level I felt confident I could now start expanding the level. I made some branching paths and also some areas that now included our block pushing puzzles. The feedback we got for our next set of playtests was much more positive.
Having the first section of our level looking better I looked to start expanding our level. I made some branching paths and also some puzzles with our new block pushing mechanic implemented. During playtesting I realized our players either didn't explore alternative paths, or they did and felt unsatisfied. Also players were still having issues judging distance on jumps.
After testing more myself I believed that the reason the jumps still felt so poorly was a combination of our floor and our platforms were the same texture, and because the lighting in our scene was pretty poor. This left our level with less sense of depth and made it hard to judge not only how far away platforms were but where your character was in relation to them. To resolve this we got some more textures from our team for our platforms and I did some more work on lighting for our scene to create better shadows from platforms and environment. After implementing these the last main things I added to our level was use our environmental props to make the level and the world feel more complete and cohesive. I added many trash and temple throughout the level as both decoration and part of the platforming.