Do or Die
Platformer where you roll the dice to make your way through all three levels and defeat your former partner!
Role: Level Design
Engine: Unity
Duration: March - April 2024
Team Size: 6
One of the first times I worked in team to work on a game, and my first time working collaboratively with revision control (Github). I learned a lot about teamwork, design principles, and communicating with my peers to ensure cohesions between our tasks and the work we'd done.
Play the game on itch.io!
Overview
Platformer Level
My main work within the project was the Platformer level, where the player has the option to choose one of two paths: one reliant on the dice throwing mechanic, meaning the player has to risk taking damage from the dice; and one purely reliant on parkour and jumping, testing the player's skill instead of their luck. This level, themed around a giant blackjack table, has two stages. The first stage has the player on top, completing it teleports them inside the table.
Top Level
Routes in the top stage are shorter and introduce the main mechanic of the whole level: choosing between pure skill expression or a blend of skill and luck. Cards on the Red path are mostly still, except for floating cards which the player can throw their Dicehead at to rotate. When rotated, they move slowly, allowing the player to easily jump on top of them. Cards on the Green path are both floating up and down and some may move from either side to side or forwards and backwards, all at varying speeds. This makes it more challenging for the player to successfully jump and parkour their way across all cards to make it to the end.
Inside Table
The routes on the inside of the table are much longer, and if the player falls on the floor, they take damage and respawn at a checkpoint at the start. While the player will spawn on the side of the route they entered in from, they can choose to parkour their way to the other route at the start. There is an invisible wall separating both sides from that point on, however. The green route is notably harder in this stage, as is the red path. Overall, the red path requires the player to roll at least 5 times to reach the end. On the green path, cards move slightly faster than they did in the previous stage, making the route even more challenging.
Epilogue: Unreal Engine Personal Project
Following the project and my work on it, I attempted to remake parts of the game within Unreal Engine as a personal project to become more familiar within the engine. With permission from my former teammates, I imported assets from the project into an Unreal project and began experimenting with recreating the systems our team had implemented into the project.
Ultimately, I managed to recreate the main menu, most of the UI, core gameplay (such as throwing dice, locking on interactable vents, and taking damage), the vent teleportation system, dialogue, and most of the maze level, before other responsibilities unfortunately led to me abandoning the project.
