Muffin Express Project 5 - Prototype 4

This is a prototype created to help decide the direction for my Junior Team's next project. The only design prompt given by the team was to create a multiplayer arena game.

Mashball is an Arena Combat game. The contestants in th arena must hold onto the bomb as long as they can without having it blow up on them.

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Coming out of Engine-proof milestone, this prototype was chosen to be the Team's next project. Over the coming months I will be posting dev blogs charting the iterative changes and progression of the game.

Muffin Express Project 5 - Prototype 3

This is a prototype created to help decide the direction for my Junior Team's next project. The only design prompt given by the team was to create a multiplayer arena game.

This is usually where I put video of the prototype, but unfortunately the project was lost before I could do so.

KickPuncher v2.0 is a 2D Beat 'em Up. This time it's about four people on three space stations left to do one thing, kick a lot of butts... but in space. A new wave of bad guys spawn every round. The players must use the lift to travel between the stations to punch all the enemies out of all the space stations.

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Combat has two stages

1. Enemies need to be stunned by players' blasters.

2. The player with the "KickPunch" powerup needs to melee the stunned enemies out a window.

Teamwork is imperative in this prototype. The rigid ruleset requires players to work together to eliminate even the smallest groups of enemies.

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Muffin Express Project 5 - Prototype 2

This is a prototype created to help decide the direction for my Junior Team's next project. The only design prompt given by the team was to create a multiplayer arena game.

Potato Sport is a badly named fictional sports game. Two players must arm themselves with potatoes and score it into the opponents goal. Players can pass and intercept airborne potatoes. All players also have the ability to build up charge at anytime by mashing on the charge button to launch their projectiles at devastating speeds.

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Muffin Express Project 5 - Prototype 1

This is a prototype created to find the direction for my Junior Team's next project. The only design prompt given by the team was to create a multiplayer arena game.

KickPuncher is a 2D Beat 'em Up. It's about four people on three floors left to do one thing, kick a lot of butts. A new wave of bad guys spawn every round. The players must kick all the dudes out in the short amount of time given or they risk failure.

My goal was was to create an emergent cooperative mechanic. When a player performs their primary kick action on an enemy it becomes stunned, knocked back, and loses a health point; inversely the enemy becomes temporarily invulnerable to the last kicker. This artificially strung out how much time it would take for one player to kick out one enemy. The strategy I wanted players to discover is that to quickly dispatch enemies, it is efficient for two players to volley an enemy back and forth, rather than playing separately.

Solo Project: PrototypeMan

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Download Prototype Man (Windows)

Genre: Platformer

Summary:
This project is the first of three assignments handed down to me by James Portnow of Extra Credits, in his DigiPen class. In this assignment, I explored which mechanics and aesthetics worked to create a 2d platformer.

My Role:

• Solo Project

Development Time: 1 month

Publish Date: 10-06-12

Post-Mortem:
There were many obstacles that got in the way of player exploring the central mechanic. Death should not have been the only way for the player to learn. There are plenty of other ways to teach and give a player space to practice a mechanic other than the through the threat of demise. Using an extreme such as player death shined a light on a problem I suffer as a designer: I get trapped trying to accomplish the big picture.

I need to become cognizant of what each moment of my game is doing to my player. There are a number of exciting set pieces and challenges, but most of them are bogged down by too much traversal, being too far from a spawn point, finicky controls.

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