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: Systems 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 that last for 48 hours. I was the sole designer on this project. We Overall Achieved Second Place with getting 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 get things done quicker and allows one to focus on the task at hand.
Creating The Premise
Once the game jam began, we immediately started brainstorming ideas on what the game we could make with the theme of “Coasting”.
The whole team pitched in ideas on what we could potentially do but eventually I had a strong vision of what we could do after listening to some of the ideas, proposing a Zen-like, endless runner style game.
This came about from not only looking up the definition of coasting, which means to advance without much movement for action, but the various surfing and nautical themes we started pitching.
Once we had the basic premise of gameplay we started thinking of what our Zen like quality could be. This when I had the idea that there could be a speed up mechanic.
This allowed coasting to take 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 a angelic chorus and a nice chill out segment.
Throughout the course of the development, I had designed over 130 unique obstacles in the game, first sketching them in a notebook and later dividing them up by difficulty. I then proceeded to incorporate over 70 of them in 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 Is able to catch at least 1-3 collectibles (the white stars seen 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 have a degree of risk involved where the player has to do some precision movement to get, but are rewarded with a large amount of collectibles. simple risk/reward stuff!
The rates of randomization of the obstacles were also done by me. I tried to balance the chances of various obstacles to create trails or unique set ups. This helped to create this coasting feel.
There are so many obstacles sets in the game that after 5 different playthroughs I haven’t seen every obstacle set meaning there is a large amount of replay factor!
Unfortunately, the randomization has resulted in some issues with the later levels begin more difficult than intended due to the low number of collectibles and high number of hazards in the later sets.