Ray’s Coast 2 Coast
Summary: An endless runner-style game where you play as a manta ray. This was my first-ever game jam competition. This game ranked 1st in design!
Role: Level Designer/Systems Designer
Project: Game Jam
Team: Sunbell, Rapha, Enrique, Greenlog451, MCGX2, Li (6 people)
Development time: July 30th-Aug 1st 2022
Made Using: Unity
A game I made for the West Coast Game Jam, hosted by IGDA San Diego, which lasted 48 hours. I was the sole designer on this project. We overall finished second, taking first in Best Audio and Design!
Lesson Learned:
Rapid Fire Iteration: Even just small variants on a thing can change the whole experience, so creating multiple variants on obstacles provides a lot of content for little cost.
Crunch Management: Pacing myself with timed goals helps me get things done more quickly and allows me to focus on the task at hand.
Creating The Premise
Once the game jam began, we immediately started brainstorming ideas for a game on the theme of “Coasting”.
The whole team pitched ideas on what we could do, but after listening to some of them, I had a strong vision for what we could do: a Zen-like, endless runner-style game.
This came about not only from looking up the definition of coasting (to advance without much movement), but also from the various surfing and nautical themes we started pitching.
Once we had the basic gameplay premise, we started thinking about what our Zen-like quality could be. This is when I had the idea that there could be a speed-up mechanic.
This allowed coasting to take on two different ideas: the player coasts through the sea, trying to pick up collectibles. At the same time, the more collectibles they get, the easier it is to collect further, thus allowing the player to “coast” through the game.
Eventually, they would reach a state called ascension, which rewarded the player with an angelic chorus and a nice chill-out segment.
Throughout development, I designed over 130 unique obstacles for the game, first sketching them in a notebook and later dividing them by difficulty. I then incorporated over 70 of them into the game within a day!
We had 3 different major obstacle types: Urchins, Space Junk, and Hermit Crabs. Urchins functioned as a simple circular obstacle, meant to be easy to navigate through, Space Junk was meant to be more randomly mixed and clumped together, akin to asteroids, finally, the Hermit Crabs were designed to be more wall like.
Obstacles were designed so that the player can catch at least 1-3 collectibles (the white stars shown in the picture). This made it so that it was easy to continue the pace of the game
However, some of the more complicated layouts were designed to also involve a degree of risk, where the player has to perform some precision movement to get them, but are rewarded with a large number of collectibles. simple risk/reward stuff!
The randomization rates for the obstacles were also determined by me. I tried to balance the chances of various obstacles to create trails or unique setups. This helped to create this coasting feel.
There are so many obstacles in the game that, after 5 different playthroughs, I haven’t seen every one, meaning there is a lot of replay value!
Unfortunately, the randomization has resulted in some issues: the later levels are more difficult than intended due to the low number of collectibles and the high number of hazards in the later sets.