Second year of Game Design at LUCA School of Arts, our personal project of the year had to be a puzzle game. My game went to be about a little robot with a limited battery, and you have to reach the end before the battery runs out, while potentially charging the battery during the game.
Prototyping
With a game idea in mind, I went to solve the most important question I had: side view or top down? After some prototyping with both ideas, and gaining valueable insights from others, I choose the top down grid-based approach.
Side
Top down grid
Level Designing
While my professors warned me that the limited mechanics might prove to be difficult to make ten interesting levels with, I proved them wrong. It took loads of playtesting and shuffling around of levels, but in the end, the progression between levels was on point, with a few harder levels at the end to show how the game could scale up.
Visuals & Sounds
Of course, a game is only halfway done without visuals or sounds. So once the levels were mostly done, I focused completely on enhancing the game's look and feel. This includes not only 3D models and 2D textures, but lighting, camera view, UI, sound effects, and music too.
That concludes my project BOT-i, which I released on Itch, playable in the browser!
