THE CURE: Peculiar Pestilence is a game where you take the role of a Medieval apothecary attempting to cure local villagers by brewing strange concoctions. (Click the arrow to read more)
Developed as an entry for the Week Sauce Game Jam by a team of roughly two dozen members, the theme for the jam was to design a game inspired by a musical artist. As a member of the design team, I took notes from the entire team’s brainstorming session and pitched the concept of a Medieval apothecary inspired by the band “The Cure”. The pitch was for a game with a heavy focus on systemic gameplay that leveraged our large team of programmers, while minimizing the amount of content that our sole artist and smaller team of musicians would have to generate.
The core gameplay loop was designed to capture the investigative nature of medicine, furthered by the antiquated practices of the Medieval times. Patients would present clues in the form of symptoms, and the player would have to administer experimental treatments to them in order to figure out which concoctions would save the day. I took on the role of systems designer for this project, working alongside a UI designer and a narrative designer.
The primary driver of engagement was the sense of competency derived from internalizing the underlying systems and mastering the art of potion crafting in order to save the village people. Therefore, constraints were provided that would challenge the player’s ability to efficiently piece together the interactions between ingredients and symptoms. Limiting raw ingredients made it impossible to trivially solve the game by trying out every possible treatment. Furthermore, preventing the player from administering too many concoctions to a single patient meant they would have to collect information across a variety of treatments and symptoms, leading to them naturally engaging with the full range of the game’s systems. Lastly, adding a time constraint provided tension and tested the player’s ability to generate solutions under pressure, appealing to the virtue of skillful play.
With these specifications in place, the team did a fantastic job delivering a polished submission that took 1st place! If you enjoy puzzling games with charming art and atmospheric music, I highly recommend you give it a try.
Developed as an entry for the Ludum Dare 50 game jam, AIRTIME! is a comedic platformer about bouncing off objects while free falling in order to stay in the air for as long as possible. (Click the arrow to read more)
The jam’s theme was “Delay the Inevitable”, and we had a 72 hour deadline with a team of four developers who had never worked together before. As the team’s designer, I proposed that we try to make a game that was humorous and leaned heavily into the jam’s theme in order to both stand out from the crowd and compete with teams who were bound to submit games with more thoroughly developed assets and gameplay systems. This meant limiting scope heavily by keeping gameplay to only one or two core actions and putting the rest of our time into polishing the player experience.
With some creative brainstorming from the whole team, we decided on the concept of a game about free-falling and trying to delay crashing into the ground. The player would see objects passing from one side of the screen to another in the distance below them, and would move laterally to try and time their fall to line up and crash into them in order to bounce back up into the air.
Within the first 48 hours, we had a game that closely resembled our final submission. With our original goal complete and extra time on our hands, I proposed that we add the ability for the player to dive straight down, giving them more agency when aiming for specific targets but also presenting a tradeoff by speeding up their descent. I was also able to get a voice actor to record some screams for an extra bit of polish. The end result was our final product, which placed 36th in Theme and 53rd in Humor out of roughly 2,000 entries.
As a designer, I am extremely pleased to say that the other members of my team, including a programmer, 3D artist, and musician, took this idea and executed on it to perfection. If you’ve read this far, I encourage you to give the game a try! I have good reason to believe you’ll get a chuckle out of it.