Beat The Clock
Beat The Clock was one of the first games I made in my college career, it’s development started in spring 2018 as an entry to Aurora Game Development(Panther Dev)’s spring 2018 Game Jam. The theme was running on flumes and I took what limited knowledge I had at time to make an experience that would engage the player. My main inspiration behind the concept was 2008’s Mirror Edge and it’s timed obstacle courses. Obviously I knew I wasn’t going to fully match the complexity of the mechanics seen in Mirror’s Edge and I wanted to do my own take on it as well. What I wanted to accomplish was to design a game that would be addictive to play. Instead of timing the player I decided to have it be a race against the clock and would collect objects that would add to your time and score.
Design breakdowns
Vertically Inclined
One of the more interesting challenges I had in developing this game was figuring out how to have the player be able to gain height so that I could vertically within in my level designs. Previously I had used moving platforms to accomplish this but for the third level I wanted to incorporate a challenge. Originally I wanted to a version of wall jumping that was seen in mirror’s edge but there a few issues with that. One of the issues is that I recall that the wall jumping in mirror’s edge being a bit clunky and only working with a single wall jump. The other reason was that I had limited time and knowledge during this game, so I couldn’t dedicate a lot of time in to figuring out how to do wall jumping in the tradition sense. Instead I thought back to my days of playing community made levels on Little Big Planet 2 and remembered how creators would create these multi layered ladders that players would jump in between to gain height. It wasn’t exactly wall jumping but it was the closest thing to it that you could do in Little Big Planet 2 without using bounce pads. So I decided that it would be best to design something similar for my game and have players jump between steps to reach the top of the vertical sections. As you see from the gif that there’s two ways of getting through these sections. You can jump side to jump or you can try to do a more advanced method to get to the step directly above you.
Trick Shot
Now the story behind this gif is quite interesting because this was not something I had in my mind when designing this level. When I was initially designing this level I intended to have one of the dangers be that you could be pushed off the map by the green blocks. However during a playtest session someone found a way to abuse this mechanic and discovered that you could take a massive short cut that would skip 75% of the obstacles in this level. Instead of trying to patch it out I decided to keep it, my thought process was that if they could figure that trick out they have earned it. However I did tweak the placement of certain pickups that would make the short cut risky. For instance if you were to not adjust your trajectory you would land on a red pick up and lose time.
A playable build can be found here