Eggsy
Eggsy is a parkour/puzzle game where you're an egg with the ability to control mechs with nests on their heads. I published it on itch.io with a fully polished webpage.
The Process
For this project I went through a cycle of brainstorming, iterating, prototyping & playtesting 4 times each over the course of 2 weeks.
Documenting it all on Miro.
Throughout these 4 cycles I was able to refine my design pipeline a lot as well as get a better grasp on how to effectively get feedback from
playtesters and how to use that feedback.
After being left with 4 great ideas at the end of the 2 months I landed on what would become Eggsy.
I made a demo version of the game over the course of
3 weeks and polished it for another 1 to improve the player feedback and such.
After that I wrote a
GDD as well as publishing the game on
itch.io & finished it off by making a concept trailer.
Level Design
For the level design I took heavy inspiration from Mario platforming games. There's always a main road to follow,
which is usually pretty doable for the target audience.
For people who want more of a challenge, they can take a sideroad. They're more difficult,
but also hold many more rewards. Like more coins & such.
Aside from the sidepaths, I had one rule when designing levels. I called it:
obstacle first, then solution.
Which meant I never wanted the player to come across, or even see, the solution before facing the obstacle.
This made for one design difficulty, you had to complete the same parkour twice. That's because the solution is always hidden
behind an obstacle course. Meaning the obstacles had to be fun & challenging both as an egg, as well as when on a mech.
Original Prototype
Originally the game was going to center around what would become the mechs. You were a character standing on a ball, so you had to move while trying
not to lose balance.
This ended up not being as fun.
So I decided to go further with the balance concept & put an egg on top of the character's head. Now you had to make sure you didn't drop the egg.
Through playtests I found out it's not actually fun to keep the egg inside the nest. So I decided to pivot with an idea a playtester had, what if you're the egg? So I made one final prototype where you're an egg & you've got to move around in the nest to move the character you stand on top of.
Conclusion
This was a course I really excelled in, I ended up getting a 90% final grade. What I took away from this is the importance of working out any vagueness as soon as your first prototype. I've built a bunch of tools to allow me to easily do this. Things like a drag and drop script to make an animation play when you enter a room, or text that tells you an area is blocked. When I started I always tried to make prototypes as barebones as possible, but just having the core mechanic isn't enough.