The Puddle Jumpers Gazette is a small, narrative focused, gamification project made over the course of my third year in the Honours Bachelor of Game Design Program at Sheridan college. This was the second year-long project I had worked on.
This was made for the course gamification over two semesters, the goal of the project was to use it as a gamification exercise and get some experience working in a longer development pipeline with a team. We were tasked with creating a vertical slice of a game from scratch, and go through the entire development process from pre-production to a playable build.
For this project, I mostly worked on game design, level design, and art implementation.
______________________________________
- Project Information -
Playable in itch.io with the link below.
Production & Project. Game Design. Level Design
Group of 6 Design Practice Project.
Approximate 7 Month development time.
2024.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
- What to gamify? -
Once my team had settled and got to know each other better, our first task was choosing an important topic to develop and gamify. At the time when the project started in late 2023, we had a few ideas within the team. But a topic that the team felt was relevant was misinformation in the news and the prioritization of engagement over factual journalism. This ended up being our strongest idea for what the game could be about, so we went ahead with it, and got to ideating.
After a few ideation meetings and discussion, we had a solid plan. We were going to create a more narrative focused game where you play as a student running a school newspaper. Depending on the story players find and then decide to run with over the course of a week, it will eventually affect the outcome of an upcoming student election.
With the team having a plan for what we wanted to make, I worked with our other level designer to start creating layouts for what we wanted the school to look like. See the image on the right for the first mockup of our level design.
I also got to work on some designs for how we could have players choose a story and work with the newspaper. See the mockup below for the intended design of our newspaper screen. As well, see the diagram on the right for the general gameplay beats we planned on having in one day of gameplay.
Very first version of the level that I created
Mockup of our gameplay beats for one day
Mockup for our newspaper screen
- Level design and art issues -
Once I had the first concept done, initial feedback was that it was way too big for the amount of characters we were going to have per room. So I worked with the team and worked out narratively which rooms we actually needed, and redesigned the space with our other designer. See the image below for the second level mockup.
Second version of our level mockup
We had one problem though, we needed a lot more custom art than our single artist could create for the game, given that this project was to be worked on in-between our 5 other courses. So we had to find a way to either find someone or source the rest of the art. Our style for what we wanted wasn't easy to find sources for, and luckily, another team had a 2D artist who could help. Their game was very low scope in terms of 2D art, so we were able to collaborate with them for this project.
We split our art into two groups, with our artist doing characters, and our collaborative artist doing level art and props. It was also at this stage where we split the level design work between me and my other team member. I was to work on the art implementation, props, and environment. While my team member was working on the overall space and layout of the school.
I got to work on creating a guide for our collaborative artist for how to make tile maps that are compatible with Unity's tiling system
Tilemap guide with free sourced examples for our artist that I created
Our tilemap
First version of the in engine level
- Steady Development Track -
After a short time, we had a tile map to work with, and we had further consolidated the amount of rooms we wanted to have. So, we made the first version of the level in the engine using this tile map. See images on the left.
Development went quick after this point, and the whole team was hard at work. I worked on implementing the art as it came, playtesting, as well as setting up the rooms based on the narrative events and characters within them. Environmental storytelling was a big focus for me. For example, the bathroom would have some of the more mischievous characters, while the geography room is in chaos with characters having a play war.
See the image below for what the final level looked like once all the props, character sprites, and art had been implemented.
Final Version of the level
- Closing Thoughts -
The Puddle Jumpers Gazette is a project I am definitely proud of. While it was not a game that had a lot of level design requirements with two designers, it was an engaging project that allowed me to take on a bigger role in the overall design for the game. Both me and my fellow level designer were splitting work and engaging in other roles to best help the team with narrative, project management, and design decisions. I learned a lot while having to implement the game art and what I can do in the future to better work with artists for level creation and what information an artist needs to make great level art. This was also my first effective use of 2D tile mapping for a game, and was a great exercise in environmental storytelling.
Thanks for reading if you made it here, and check out the top of the page for the link to our playable build in itch.io!