The Book of Don't

Summary

The Book of Don't was developed as part of a weekend game jam for UC Irvine's Video Game Development Club. Each team participating drew a random theme from a hat and had to incorporate both the theme from the hat and the theme of randomness, so we developed a platformer inspired by Tower of Heaven that randomly generates restrictions and obstacles for the player such as removing their ability to double jump, or inverting the camera. 

What I Did

Everyone else on the team was new to game development at the time, so I led the brainstorming session and helped the team formulate a basic design outline including mechanics and art style. I implemented the inital platforming mechanics early on, and later focused on implementing and refining level designs in Unity that another team member was sketching out on paper. 

What I Learned

This was one of my first projects in Unity, so I learned a lot about game programming patterns and scripting here. We wanted to squeeze in as many levels as we could into 48 hours, but we had one key challenge in that every level needed to be able to be completed with every restriction, which meant each level needed to be carefully tuned so that no walljumping, double jumping, or short jumps were required to reach the end. This ended up heavily impacting the design of our levels and I think the game would have been better if we had focused on making one polished level that made use of the randomness instead of a bunch of smaller levels.