Roles
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Design Lead
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Project Lead
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Programmer
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Level Designer
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UI Designer
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Sound Design Helper
A Small but Sweet Package
Gumbearable is a game that I created in a team of 5 during a week-long game jam. The purpose of the jam was to create a digital escape room. Gumbearable is a 2D-platformer escape room game where players must control multiple gummy bears to collect pieces of a candy crane in order to save the gummy bear queen.
Made in Unity 2D
Designing Mechanics that "Stick" with Players
Gumbearable's central gameplay loop revolves around 3 pillars:
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2D platforming (moving and jumping)
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Sticking (To walls, floors, and other bears)
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Switching (Between the different bears)
I worked hard on the character controller to make sure it felt good for players to move, jump, and stick. While these parts were easier, it was the switching bears that proved to be the more difficult mechanic to design for. It was imperative to me that players had multiple options in how to switch between bears. We decided to let players either click on a bear to control it, or use the scroll wheel to cycle between bears. In earlier designs it was one or the other, but both had issues.
For clicking a bear, if bears were off-screen then they would not be able to be selected. If the scroll wheel was the only option, players could get frustrated cycling through all of the bears when they just wanted to control a specific one. Giving players both options was seen to be very successful during our extensive playtesting. Very rarely was it seen that players would use only one or the other.
There were a few challenges with this puzzle as well. The first was the metrics. I needed to make sure the jump wasn't possible with only one gummy bear, but also make it seem like it wasn't an impossible jump either. One of the features we added to the game to help with this was the "sticky wall" signifier to show that maybe the player should try sticking a bear to the wall there.
There was also a frustration issue where players would lose a bear by not making the jump on the first try, then fall all the way back to the start. This is why another platform was added underneath the jump to make sure if players missed the jump then they could just try again.
Escaping the Confines of the Level Design Challenge
One of the design challenges of this project was to make an escape room that challenged both the player's skills and intellect. Of course, we didn't want to design it to be too difficult, but wanted to make players feel as though they have a mastery over controlling multiple bears. The goal for the level design was to force players to get comfortable with the character controller, then use that mastery to solve the puzzles within the game.
My personal favourite puzzle that I designed is a jumping puzzle above the queen bear that required 4 bears and a little bit of timing. Players need to bring a bear to the top of one wall by stacking other bears, then they need to use that bear to jump across a large gap and stick to the wall in order to act as a platform for another bear to jump across and make the gap. (GIF below)