Swampside
A 3D platformer about a frog that cleans the environment
Swampside
Team: Patryk Tokarz, Albert Ojapalo, Anil Heeraman, Muhammed Saeed, Sam Ponpadung //
Tools: Unreal Engine 5 // Time: 5 months (Ongoing)
Swampside is a 3D platformer unreal engine game that was created as a school project from late 2022 - mid 2023. This game was made for my Design Practice: Gamification class, this project spans two semesters and is currently ongoing. The deadline to present our product is late April.
This project has five members including myself that have all made meaningful contributions to the design, production and testing of the game. This is an assigned project from our college, so there are specific deliverable we must meet.
Design and production (Ongoing Team Project)
A simplified summary of the project is that semester one (3.5 months) of the project was dedicated to the design and planning of the game. We were tasked with creating a GDD based on an industry example, risk assessments, Jira project tasks, asset lists and more! This semester focused on the preproduction of Swampside.
Semester two is dedicated to the production of the game. The game production is currently ongoing and is going extremely well and I'm quite happy with the product's progression.
Cleaning mechanic
Swampside is a platformer where you play as a frog that is cleaning the environment. The game ties the message of cleaning the environment through its mechanics. The main verb of the game is to clean, therefore that is our main mechanic! Initially a level's environmental art is covered in toxic purple goo, the player can use a cleansing kick ability to clean this goo. When a player does this the level assets transform into a green, unpolluted environment.
Current Progress of the game
As I'm writing this we are about to have our second round of playtests, and that's really gonna help our game. From the first playtest we are finding out that some of the initial design choice didn't resonate with the players and we are redesigning those features. A specific example is for our AI enemies, we have a mechanic where if you jump on the head of the enemy they die, but in a 3D space a lot of our playtests struggled with that. The team is thinking of including a leapfrog type death, where you can also jump over the head of enemies to kill them. Makes sense cause the character is a frog haha!
For now I'll post a couple of screenshot of our work in progress game below.
Mid project UPDATE
Project is going extremely well, we learned a lot from our last playtest and have implemented some quality of life changes for most of our mechanics. The team is currently in the process of converting our blockouts into shippable levels, we plan to focus a bit on the world building aspect of the art by trying to make our levels look like they are infected/dying.
For myself, I've actually finished all of my tasks and have been applying an extra layer of polish to my mechanics. I had a meeting with my team to inform them that since my tasks were done I would be needing something to do. Like stated before we wanted to focus on worldbuilding, so we had the idea of introducing interactable NPC's and in-game cutscenes.
I started working on my tasks this week and I'd like to show some of my early prototypes.
