Bob's Lab

- Date: October 2023

- Project: Game

- Role: Game Designer, Character/Environment Designer, Artist, Animator, Programmer

- Tools Used: Unity 2D, Photoshop, Krita, Github

- Link to Project: Play it here! (You can play it right in your browser!)

- Project Brief: A small project I worked on in the October 2023 48-hour Game Jam at UW-Whitewater. I worked on this game with a team of 2 others, and I'm very proud of the awesome work we did in a short time! The Jam's theme was "Over the top", so we designed the game around jumping "over the top" of rising walls. I did a lot of the first day's designing and planning, all the game's art assets (excluding the sfx/music), and helped out a bit with some of the programming (mostly for the animations).

The theme for this 48 hour game jam was "over the top". As soon as the theme was announced, I started brainstorming ideas. One of the first concepts I had was a platformer where you race to jump "over the top" of rising walls. I was lucky to have had a couple of talented developers, Drew Schnieder (programmer/level designer) and Brandon Waltersdorf (programmer/level designer) be looking to form a team at the same time. We continued to brainstorm some other ideas, but we kept coming back to my original concept of the rising walls game, so we decided on that. Once we decided on our concept, we brainstormed ideas with concept sketches for different abilities and platform types that would appear in the game, such as the breakable platforms and switching platforms which move back and forth.

By the end of the first night, we had our game's design down, and I had already got to work on creating multiple character sketches for what the playable character would look like. I came up with a few ideas, such as a ninja/thief character escaping security with a jewel, but I liked the idea of a robot character in a testing lab, so we went with that for the game's theme and setting. This idea eventually turned into a little crash-test dummy-like robot named Bob, whose job is to test out super high jumping boots for a lab of scientists. Most of the rest of our remaining time was spent programming the game and making the art assets.

By the night of the final day, we ended up having a few hours of extra time, which we mostly used to design a bunch of levels for the game, and add some visual effects like the flame effect when using the rocket boots.

If I were to expand the game, I would love to add more abilities and some of the cut platforms, such as a sticky platform where the player needs to continuously jump to get out of it, a slippery platform, and a bouncy platform. I'd also work more on the art assets, especially the animations, as I didn't have a lot of time to smooth them out. I feel that the game is pretty complete at its core, so not much more needs to be added.