Be Square

A prototype for a unique platforming mechanic!

Here's a prototype for a unique platforming concept, where you traverse in a circle, bending reality as you traverse through a curved stage. 

This originally was meant to be a running/side-scroller parallax puzzle platformer (see concept art below). 

·········• FEATURES •········· 

• Travel through a curved level with simple platforming
• Mess around with jumping to achieve weird and large jumps to traverse big gaps
• Levels that work forwards as well as backwards!
  • NOTE: You cannot backtrack UNTIL you've gone through the entire circle map. Then you can backtrack and play the level backwards!

·········• CONTROLS •·········

• Use A/D or Arrowkeys to move
• Use SPACE to jump!
  • Note: You can spam jump or hold it down, resulting in some large jumps

·········•  CREDITS  •·········

• Kimya Taheri - Game Concept/Design, Visuals
• Ben Hecker - Programming, Game Design
• Media:
  • Background Music: Miitopia OST - Book

·········•  INFO  •·········

• Engine: Unity
• Date: October 2024
• Time to Make: 1 Day
• Made For: 1 week rapid prototype project for a studio game class, NYU Game Design

·········•  AUTHOR'S NOTE  •·········

For this assignment, we were given a folder of incredibly random and strange assets, and were told to use only those assets for our game. Naturally, this was a challenge for me, since I'm more of an artist than a programmer. Since visuals tend to be what I focus on the most and how I ground the rest of the game, I was stumped for a while. One of the mechanics I chose for this project was “movement” so I decided to use basic platforming mechanics but come up with a fun twist. I was most inspired by the “ship enemy” assets, which were a set of 4 rectangles on top of each other, with separate but aesthetically pleasing color palettes. I envisioned an entire game that looked like the sprites. As in, the sprites would be the entire background and part of the foundations of my game idea. 

This was the sprite that inspired this entire game. No, really.

To do this, I first needed to recreate the asset but in higher quality. This was a small, pixelated sprite, clearly meant for a retro-style game. If I wanted to make this the size of the screen, the pixels would have made it hard to look at it. Once I recreated the rectangles in the same position and same color in my art program, I began editing the image and splicing it so I could use it in different ways. I moved the rectangles so that they were all centered and getting smaller, which creates perspective and depth. I then took the rectangles and cut out pieces of them to make them into blocks for levels and platforms. For the player character, I cropped the “icons” we were given and took the bathroom symbol character to be the main character. Like with the background, I cleaned it up so it was in high quality and ready to be in the game. 

Originally, I wanted the platforming to be more of a complete side scroller, where all four paths are parallel with one another and the player can use the numbers 1-4 to choose which “path” to go on, depending on the obstacles. I was hoping that I could create a puzzle game with multiple levels where the player needs to interact with different “paths”, designed to look like the foreground and background in a simplistic vector style, to pass and complete levels. I then pivoted the idea so that the character is moving along the walls, first the bottom, then the right, then moving in a counter clockwise direction. I was inspired by the tools old filmmakers used to show gravity changing, wherein they would create a box that rotates and have the camera rotating at the same speed, with the actors interacting in it like a hamster wheel. This design added a different type of challenge; this one centered on control schemes, rather than a puzzle of which path to take. I think both are still good ideas, but the new idea seemed more feasible with the time constraints, since I had never used parallax in Unity before. 

Overall, I wanted to give the player a unique platforming experience, and while I was only able to make 1 level, I hope it was a taste of the potential this game can have with the right level designers and visual artists!

Fun Tidbit: This game originally was supposed to be a side-scrolling platform/puzzle game where you run on a track that parallax-effects with other tracks and you have to go in/out of tracks to traverse through levels! See below for my two pieces of concept art for how I envisioned both versions (the initial + final version).

Fun Tidbit #2: This was one of the most popular prototypes in Major Studio and was the result of 2 (technically 3) Proof of Concepts projects we did in the rest of the semester!

The two versions of the game I had! I went with the second one, especially since this was a 1-week prototype.

·········•  KNOWN BUGS  •·········

• made in a few days so anything is possible, lol
• mac builds don't always work (blame apple)