Camel to the Stars
Project Team:
Evan Halevi (figold666) - Project lead, Artist, Level and mechanics design, Composer, Playtester
ekab10 - Programmer, Artist
What I contributed:
Designed and made all sprites and objects.
Designed gameplay loop, mechanics, and feel.
Designed and implemented levels.
Composed all songs.
Designed and created all sound effects.
Play-tested to completion too many times.
“The gameplay is really compelling as you’re forced to explore in order to find new ways to progress, plus sometimes even goofing off pays off which really added to the fun. It’s addictive in the best way and the music absolutely slaps! You really did a great job with this, thank you so much for sharing!”
Challenges Faced:
Extreme Workload: This game had a large amount of components: sprites, music, level and mechanical design, and implementation for all of those parts. Proper delegation to my teammate and carefully taking breaks was key to completing everything.
Complexity of Gameplay: Some of the game’s mechanics, namely the tongue, had some strange errors during coding. We used process of elimination and heavy testing to iron out everything that we wanted to (while leaving a little bit of ‘speedrunning jank’).
‘Developer’s Bias’: Due to testing the game so much, I became used to the difficulty of the game. Upon release, many players found it too hard. This was a learning experience for my future projects and their level of difficulty.
Design Considerations:
Speedrun routing: Each level is designed with at least one ‘speedrun’ route in mind, allowing the player to finish each level exceptionally fast if they notice the various allowances in the level design. This helps to increase the depth of the game.
Versatility of level completion: While only three gems are needed to complete each level, more than three gems are placed in each level. This opens up the possibility for countless routes in levels, many of which may be faster than the ‘intended’ or ‘speedrun’ routes. This, combined with the creativity of movement, invites deployability.
Clipping and exploits: With the ‘tongue’ powerup the player is given the ability to clip into and around walls, which allows some exceptionally creative mobility. These ‘exploits’ are intended and have been planned around, which rewards the player for experimentation but not so much so where it devalues other ways to play the game.
Risk-Reward: Many of the more difficult ways to complete the levels are much, much faster. This incentivizes the player to learn and get good at the more tricky segments in the levels, but still allows completion if a player can only do the simple sections.
“I spent 35 minutes with this game, the music was incredible and loved the art too! Plasma Paul is great. The upgrades you can collect add variety to the gameplay as you progress. There was a good amount of checkpoints throughout the levels that were well-placed. You can actually tongue spam through walls and get out of the level to cheese certain areas haha. Had a lot of fun with this one!”
“The third level was designed by a terrorist.”