Swimmie's & Landie's little adventure
Ocean Buddie
In this co-op, split-screen puzzle platformer, you and a friend will need to work together and use your unique abilities to solve challenging puzzles and navigate through the beautiful archipelago of Sandie Islands. This was the second game project we had at Futuregames. The theme for the project was "Symbiosis", and the only guidelines we had to follow was that it had to be a multiplayer game. It was made over the course of 4 weeks, by a team of 9 people. For this project I was a level designer as well as composer of the soundtrack together with another team mate.
Ocean Buddie was the first project where I got to focus on one role, being level design. Other than quickly scribbling together a cute little soundtrack, me and a team mate got to sit down and really try and create a level that felt both intuitive and exciting. First we thought of the map of the level going in a kind of circle, where you early on in the game would see the end goal but not be able to get to it yet. This was the original sketch-out of the map.
However, because of the co-op gameplay, the team decided that the game should have a fixed camera perspective, which meant that the player wouldn't be able to move the camera around. It would instead be fixed, pointing at an angle, making the game more of a sort of sidescroller. We had to rethink the map and put the whole thing on a line. The end result turned out like this.
Since we had decided on making a puzzle platformer, a lot of our time was spent coming up with clever puzzles, which is something I realised I really enjoy. It is also something I got really good at throughout the 4-week development. The end puzzle is one I'm particularly proud of, and took a lot of work figuring out. Here is the original sketch-out, as well as the end result.
As the game was closing in on release, some other team members needed help with the animations, so I got to dust off my animation chops. It had been a while since I played around with keyframes and such, but it was a welcome change of pace! Here as some of the animations I did.
