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Rocky Road - Armadillo Rocky

overview

Rocky Road is a 3D Platformer game made in Unity, made within seven days for the game jam, dedicated to level design. I was responsible for Level Design of most of the levels and focused on obsticales and fun aspects of the game. I was involved in implementing models and prefabs for each level and creating platform prefabs and building a workflow environment using discord and github tools. This work was in collaboration with Mango, EP, Pajumi.

Level Design

Since the game is 3D Platformer based, Level Design needed to be as simple as possible and now complexity levels should be added until later within the levels. The options for gadgets had to be simple as well since we had seven days to complete. To achieve this, we brainstormed gadgets to assist and deceive the player to create interesting obstacles within levels.

Level Design Process

Our game's inspiration was Sonic The Hedgehog and it aligned with the game jams theme overall. My task was to come up with levels for the character however he only moved towards the z-axis. Monkey Super ball, Sonic The Hedgehog Franchise and Kirby Dream Course were inspiration to go to since they're both something similar we were trying to achieve. The decision was made to make sure that the level catered for Rocky’s movement since he only moves towards the z-axis but also making it tricky for the players to enjoy.

Since the camera panned at a 90 degree perspective, we were able to make levels much easier and a lot simplier. Keeping in mind that Rocky moves towards the z-axis, we were able to complete levels faster than intended but we wanted flavour within the game. So we added Spring gadgets and boost gadgets to assit the players movement and gameplay while also creatively adding it as an obstacle. Spikes were later added for a much quicker death timer or reset so the game doesn't seem too bland in the process of completing the levels.

Making levels in Unity can be frustrating because of the many options there are available. It was decided that tiles would be the appropriate approach to making a level in Unity. That meant we wouldn't worry too much about collusion and we could make as many prefabs as we would like. Because of relying on prefabs, we made really creative tiles that made levels much interesting during development.