Propane Games
Game Developer
Windows version available here
Step Nine
Winner of Global Game Jam 2020
Theme - Repair
General Description:
Step nine is a Visual Novel with branching paths and a handful of mini-Games to complement the narrative.
In Step 9 you play as an alternate version of yourself. A version of yourself who has been struggling with addiction for some time. A version of yourself who is sick of hurting the people around you, and has finally started to follow the 12 steps of your addiction recovery. A version of you who wants to apologize to those you hurt the most. What will you say to try and make amends How will they react? Time for you to find out.
Development
This year's theme was Repair, with this in mind our team started brainstorming and quickly came to a conclusion that we wanted to mend relationships, mixing our forces, we figured out a visual novel would be really interesting, having one writer and a great 2D artist. By having a few veterans in the team we were able to scope the game in a decent way that we did not have to remove most of the features we planned.
My involvement in this project was pretty mixed, for the most part I worked on the designing on the game, the programming mostly of the dialogue system and some of the mini-games aspects. I also overlooked the narrative and dialogue to get the best result possible.
All in all, this year's project was a success, the judge really enjoyed it and I hope you will also.
Game Developer
Windows and Android version available here
Conclusion
This project was quite the roller coaster of development, came across many obstacles​ but in the end I came up with a product that is working as intended, with some interesting designs that I think works really well in the Card game genre.
As for myself as a game developer, I learned two valuable lessons. First one being that clients can have expectations that can’t be achieved cause of multiple factors (bugs etc.)
The second one, on a lighter note, made me understand so many facets of game development, since I was the sole developer on this project, I had to do everything from A to Z. I learned so many new things that will definitely be useful in my future works.
Aviators in Action
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Client from Singapore
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Platform: Android
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Purpose: Client’s school assignment (not even kidding)
General Description:
Aviators in Action is a 2 to 5 players card game in which you need to complete five scenarios before you opponents. Scenarios have different careers required to complete. Player have in their hand 8 cards, career cards and special cards. Career cards are made to solve scenarios while special cards will either help to complete scenarios, or will throw a wrench in your opponents plan.
Development
With some back and forth, we decided that I would take 30 days to complete the project and paid in different milestones. The client sent me a copy of all the cards in the game and an instruction sheet which wasn’t really complete, but gave me more than enough to get me started. I started slowly to build data tables for all the different cards, made decks and afterward and give my first player a hand. I had to rework a few things over time to make sure it works with multiple players. When I got the players hands and being able to complete scenarios I started to work on Special cards. This is where the programming difficulty creeped up, and where the client started to do some interesting things, I would ask him fairly straight questions, he would give me an answer, the next time I would show what I did he would say that it’s suppose to be the opposite of what he told me earlier. Since the special cards were influencing multiple systems, they created lots of conflicts. After 2 weeks of work, the client asked me to have a fully functional version by the third week. I told him that might not be possible but I would try my best. I got stuck for multiple days on one card “swap” (choose a card from your hand and swap it randomly with the player of your choice) I had to make three completely different systems before finding the one that would finally work properly. That definitely took me asides on fixing bugs but also implementing other systems like a timer or else. I had a few days out of town (which I told the client) just when he wanted the functional version. That day he told me that the game was actually for a school assignment (that he paid big bucks for). When I came back home I went back to work, finished it by the 30 day mark like first discussed.
The Blue Ghostening
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Global Game Jam
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Theme: What homes means to you
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Platform: Windows & Android
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Team of 7 devs
General Description:
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The "The Blue Ghostening" is a puzzle game entirely played with a mouse. In the game you play as a ghost who is overprotective of his ancient home. When a new family moves in, their renovation angered the ghost. Your job, is evict them through tension and fear. The game is divided by scene, each scene featuring the ghost and one NPC. To scare the NPC you have to build tension by interacting with the home's furniture, when you feel the NPC's tension is hight enough, you can convert to fear with the "Scare" mechanic. Different amount of tension is generated depending on the distance to the NPC and the direction they are looking at when interacting with the house.
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Gameplay
Game Jam
This year's theme was: What home means to you. With that in mind we spent a few hours throwing different ideas out, ranging from a Kennel simulator to a kid trying to get adopted in a neighborhood. Having 4 designers we decided to go with a management game and the idea of a ghost protecting his old house stick with everyone on the team. Our based idea was to build a house with multiple objects that could be interacted with that would build a fear meter, but trying to keep the sanity level safe so that the new occupants wouldn't call a ghost eradicator. Our idea seemed doable at first, but we ended up having issues setting up our project, due to GitHub being stingy and trying to get the project working as a C++ project. After finally ironing out the issues we started working as fast as we could. At the end of the second day, we realized that building the whole house was not going to be possible for our sole 2D artist but also programming wise we still had way too much to build. We decided to focus on only one room (the kitchen). We used only 2D assets in a 3D world which caused us multiple issues, for example, we had to make the animation of the sprite on an event tick changing the sprite constantly to make the illusion of an animation. We ended up fixing the bugs and inserting everything only a few minutes before the deadline. We were pretty proud of ourselves.
My involvement
At first I was involve in the design of the game, as almost everyone was. When we started dividing task I ended up being in charge of the narrative, I wrote a little story about the Ghost and the family. Even wrote diaries written by the ghost. Alas barely none of it was used in the final product due to lack of time to implement them.
Besides that, I ended up being the one touching a little bit of everything, setting up sprites, programming part of the game, adjusting the lighting and sooo much more.
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Conclusion
Even though we didn't win any award for the game, I am really proud of what we could achieve, we had something out of the ordinary that was working perfectly. I got to meet some extraordinary people who are passionate of video games like I am and I got learn so many new things, just by working on a 2D game point and click was something I never even remotely touched before and it was a great experience. I can't wait to participate in the next GameJam!
Game Developer
Hacking Mini-game
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Client : American with money
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Purpose: add a hacking mini game to a 3d side scroller game
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Period of time: 3 weeks
General Description:
I decided to make a hexadecimal deciphering hacking mini-game. The goal is simple, find the letters and/or numbers that matches the randomly generated word without making 3 errors or let the time runs out. The catch is, those letters moves, rotates on different axis to catch the player off guard. This whole system is built to be easy for the developers to change difficulty and behaviour for each time the player will encounter the hacking mini-game.
Gameplay
Development
I was not told much about the project besides that it's a side scroller and they would want to add a hacking mini-game but they didn't know where to go from there They gave me free rein on the whole design. The dev would need to be able use that mini-game on multiple occasions, so from the get go I knew I needed a modular system. My first idea was to have a “Cog” system, in which the player would have to fit the different pieces together, the basic idea was quite interesting but within the time frame I had, it was impossible for me to have something functional. The idea that stick was the hexadecimal system. I built the system to make sure it would be easy for the dev to modify afterward. The time limit was fairly short so I couldn't implement everything I wanted, like a letter that on one side if you clicked it would make an error, or have the pieces change position afterward.
Conclusion
I'll be honest, I doubt this game will ever come out, it seemed like some guys who just paid off freelancers to make different things and it will just end up as a development mess. But for myself, I learned some interesting programming tools and it helped me grow as a designer and I got to know my limits.
Modular System
Celestial Cataract
Game Designer and narrative designer
Game Design Document
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Summary
This game was created with a certain target audience that was created by mixing two targets players that were invented by us.
This brought Celestial Cataract, a game in which the story is quite important with easy to pick up but in depth mechanics, we also added a light RPG element to upgrade the character over the course of the game. This game would be an open world with an accent on exploration.
The game is a first person hack and slash in which you take control of an Angel who needs to meddle with our known world to be able to save earth, or destroy it...
Story
The Game takes place in modern time on the brink of an apocalypse, hundreds of years after the last war between angels and demons. The devil has been plotting for years to come back and take control of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Erelah, an angel who's been in training for a really long time is sent to investigate the situation and gather knowledge. The story begins with the first horseman artifact being stolen and you are task to retrieve it.
The story has branching paths with decisions that will affect gameplay and story.
Gameplay
The gameplay of this game is based on games like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta but with a first person twist. The player can make multiple attacks that can fit different situations or enemies. Weapons and abilities can be upgraded, but also the character unlocks new abilities throughout the game like ultimate attacks which can differ depending on the choices you make.
Difficulties
To create a game that was tailored to two different target audiences, brought some ideas that didn't pan out exactly how we wanted them, but after many hours of brainstorming we came out with an idea that we thought would fit properly our idea.
Later into the development, damage and health pool was harder to fill and adjust than expected, but without a full proper prototype those numbers aren't finals but we believe that only a few tweaks would be needed.
The Gilded War
Game design Document
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Game Designer and narrative designer
Summary
The goal of this assignment was to transpose the MOBA genre into a board game. Since all three of us are TF2 and Overwatch players, we decided to use them and recreate something similar. We ended up using the Control point from Overwatch and put our own twist on it. Class based Heroes from both teams battle in the arena to gain control of the artifact.
Story
During the industrial revolution a selected group of special human beings are forced to defend the society from a strange presence whose intention is to take over everyone and everything. Those special beings are called Chimeras. Magic users, werewolves, and sentient AI are fighting for artifacts scattered throughout the world. The strange presence goal is to use those artifacts to channel the annihilation of the planet.
Gameplay
The two teams of 3-5 players chooses their hero and familiar to fight in the arena. During a player's turn, the hero and familiar have the ability to move and use one action and the hero also have a reaction that can be used at any moment. Every heroes have their own unique Actions and reactions, with different effect and damage. Most of the abilities are dice based, which determined damage and other elements. When only one team stands on the control point, this team takes control and needs to hold it for 10 turns, while the other team tries to take it back. Only one team can be the winner.
Difficulties
The first and main issue we came across was the choice of either adding "support" characters or not. I believed that support heroes are important, while the two others did not want to add any to the game. This brought some heated discussions but we ended up making those familiars into support only which was a good compromise to everyone in the team. Another problem was to create heroes that were never seen before in games. With some many class based heroes games released in the past few years and the limitation of a board game, made us scratch our heads to find something interesting.
Breaching The Iron mountain
Game design Document
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Game Designer and narrative designer
Summary
The goal of this project was to create a game that uses a mechanic of consensus in a coop game. We've decided to make a strategy game with multiple floors/levels in. Action points is a valuable resource that needs to be allocated to the different players in your team to be able to succeed on the next section of the game. The game has an increasing amount of enemies, hazards weather challenges and bosses to encounter. Breaking the Iron Mountain is a strategy turn-based Rogue-Like game that doesn't hold your hand but is still really fun and enjoyable.
Story
In 2037, New Korea is one of the most powerful countries on the Planet and decides to invade America. They destroy most of the land; a plethora of bombs were dropped on the United States. A few survivors formed an alliance to take back the desolated land of America. The players are part of an expedition to take back one of the New
Korea's military base. If they succeed, they might still have a chance to take back their land and make America great again.
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****Funny Anecdote : This was written only a few weeks before the meeting between South and North Korea.
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Gameplay
The game has two different parts, the first one is the consensus part, in which players must decide who gets how many Action points and if players wants to trade items. The second part which takes place on the board, at least two players must reach the end of the floor, but there is enemies, weather effects, hazards scattered throughout the floor that will try to make your life harder. The players must also decide if they want to loot the different areas, but some of them might be guarded or too far in a map to be able to reach within the action points limit. Some floors has special bosses that you will need to defeat in order to proceed to the end of the floor.
Difficulties
The first problem we encountered was "death" I personally believed that since we were making a rogue-like game players when they died, it should be the end for them, but my partners weren't really on board with this idea, mostly because the game is coop. That's why we ended up making items and mechanics for the purpose of reviving or bringing another character into the mix during a play through. Another thing was the balance of the weapons and enemies, we created a lot of different types and giving them values was not as easy as it seems, this being our first game design project, we learned quite a lot regarding balancing.
