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White Flour

Half Uur

Description
A 2.5D Platformer inspired by games such as Kirby's Canvas Curse and Super Mario Bros. The Embodiment of Time has kidnapped the life of your party, in turn your party will end if he has her for too long, so you run jump slow time and draw all in an attempt to have even just Half an Hour left.

Goals/History
This game was a request for a music artist from a small Dutch music artist known as LauLau, and he requested us to make a game to promote his upcoming song at the time called Half Uur. This project ended up being chosen by him to promote his song.

I wanted to practice more of my Game Design skills because at the time I was solely locked to mostly programming, My main vision was to make this game in the style of old NES platformers where the player has to keep hitting their head in the wall until they understand the flow and controls, rewarding commitment replayability and experimentation.

All in all it ended up as my most proudest yet.

Roles​​

Level Design

Level Sketch 9.jpg
Level Sketch 1.jpg

  • Concepting

I innitially designed the level with the mindset of someone playing an NES platformer, mainly being to learn and get better by doing rather than to just read a manual and understand it, as well as "dividing" a singular level into smaller segments that intertwine with each other, allowing the player to experiment and have every playthrough feel unique and different.​

Level Sketch 2.jpg
Level Sketch 10.jpg

Concept Sketches & Notes

Level Alpha 1.png
Level Beta 2.png

  • Iterations

I would keep on adding new level segments as the game developed and I developed my knowledge on Game Design Theory, with 2 major iterations; The first was designed specifically for the basic run and jump mechanics, as the main mechanic of the game (the drawable platforms) weren't fully fine tuned at the time. As the main player mechanics became more developed I remade the level with those mechanics in mind, as well as compacting the level more to reduce dead time and overall play length. After making the Grey Box, I gave the work to the artists to place their assets to how they see fit.​

trailer by Peteris Martinovs 

In Game Level Iterations

Level RC 2.png
Final Lighting In Scene.png

UX Research / Concepting

  • Iterations

As usual, I would always start by making a weird unique concept for my game, & I even had more of an opportunity to show it off due to this client case. The main two goals were to make the game a web game, so the player could easily access it without hassle, and prioritize promoting the song itself; I designed the game around these two main points. Although my concepts didn't get chosen for the final project, they helped in fleshing out the main concept.​

MVP 1.png
MVP 2.png

  • Research

Once the main concept was created, I worked on studying how a music listener would be interested in a game; I did this by research & cataloguing my assumptions. The first thing we did was make the assumptions and understanding the bare minimum of our target audience, I did this via assumptions and and expert interview I conducted. Once we had that we made a Questionare and performed some onsight questioning, my main contribution being arranging a questioning session where we questioned the customers at De Jongens Van Hemmes, a record shop in Groningen. These kept on happening as we worked more and more on the project and helped us in understanding what appeals most to the user and how we could use that knowledge to subvert their expectations and make something more easily digestible.

Job Story.png
Core Learning Loop.png
Collective Design Requirements.png

Programming

  • Enemy AI

I was more focused on Design with this projects than with others, so I programmed the smaller things in the game, however I was heavily involved in 2 main aspects of the programming, one of which being the enemy ai. The idea was to make them innitially complex to the player and have the player figure out a way to simplify their patterns. I designed the patterns of the enemies as I was programming them, so a lot of it is gut feeling but it was based around the refference. After the main interactions were solidified, stats were adjusted or reworked based on UX.​

  • Optimization

With this case being the most professional project I've worked on, and with the ambitions of the rest of the team, I wanted to give the teams as much wiggle room to work with, so I lead on working on the back end and optimization of the game. This taught me a lot of how games are optimized in the higher industry and allowed the game to be presentable at all times and gave us a lot more freedom than previous projects.​

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