Iron Explorer

Game genre: Side-scrolling 2.5D Platformer.​

Gameplay summary: Platform your way through the cave, collect health and upgrades as you go, hit the checkpoints where you can, get to the end boss!

Platform: Windows PC.​

Engine: Unity.

Time spent on project: Aug - Sep 2020 (6 weeks)

My job role(s): Lead game designer. Artist. Sound designer.

Iron Explorer was a fun early game dev experience, the first actual project we got to develop in our Production phase of our studies, this was what we made for Game Jam 1. It was kept pretty simple on purpose because we were all still pretty new to this.

​

A simple platformer game, collect health, dodge obstacles etc etc.

​

Originally we planned to make the platforming flow downhill not uphill as most tend to use, and while that idea was doable, it ultimately meant too many design headaches long term so we switched back to the typical uphill platforming level design.

​

My contributions to this project:

• Game design.
  - I designed the game flow, mechanics, art style, characters, story, level design, I was the sole designer, but still collaborated with my team for valuable design suggestions.
  - Made several iterations of prototypes to gather feedback from the team & teachers.
  
  

• Art.
  - I created all the 3D models except for the main robot character. We decided to keep the overall art style low poly.
  - I created all the particle FX.
  - I set up the post processing, including Bloom, Depth of field for a tilt shift effect, film grain, vignette etc
  - I made the mechanical gears, elevators and obstacles, all requiring precise mathematical design so the interlocking gear teeth etc actually worked! I was proud of that.
  - I animated everything in game except for the main robot character.
  
  

• Programming.
  - I proposed mechanics etc and delivered pseudo code to the teams programmers for discussion and modifying existing code we were testing, but I had no direct programming duties on this project.
  
  

• Audio.
  - Sourced, modified or created the SFX for this project.
  - Mechanical SFX were hard to find to match the giant clunky steampunk feel, as well as have it set within a huge echoey cave.

​

​

Highlights from this project:

• I was fresh from my 3D animation studies, so I made the flying mechanical bat you see in game, rigged it and animated it. I'm proud of that steampunk bat :D

• My first foray into making low poly models in a triangular art style.

• I was quite proud of the gears and mechanical apparatus in the levels working correctly with no clipping of the teeth etc, a little attention to detail many may not notice.

• I quite like my "health slug", the idea was this creature is the source of health you had to extract in some way (robot oil perhaps lol), not some arbitrary health pack.

​