Team Size: 5
Company: Excalisoft
Role: Game and Level Designer
Engine: In-house Engine
During my education at the NHTV University of Applied Sciences, I went on an internship at Excalisoft, a small game developer located in The Hague, the Netherlands.
Pilot Perils is a side-scrolling action-adventure game for iOS devices, in which the player controls pilot Jack in his flying contraption. Flying through the broken Steampunk world of Alvor, the player must navigate a world full of floating islands, obstacles and exotic steam-powered machines in a quest to retrieve the components of Jack’s stolen invention. A hazardous fog constantly forces the player forwards, adding a feeling of urgency to the game.
I joined the project early in development, and was intimately involved with the project’s game and level design. My assignments in the project focused primarily on three fields: prototyping and defining the game’s control scheme, designing and prototyping the game’s obstacles and designing a set of levels.
As the team’s sole programmer only worked on the project part-time, I did my prototyping and experimentation in Unity, using PlayMaker for visual scripting. I recreated the game’s existing functionality in Unity and experimented with multiple control schemes until I landed on a unique control scheme that felt intuitive and easy to use. The control scheme sees the player use both thumbs to control Jack’s aircraft: pressing on the left side of the screen makes Jack move left, pressing on the right side moves Jack to the right, and placing both thumbs on the screen makes Jack move up. When no touch input is detected, the player automatically moves down. This control scheme allows the player to have full control of their movement, and enables challenges involving minor backtracking in a side-scrolling game.
After defining the game’s control scheme, the prototype was handed off to the programmer and all functionality was recreated in our in-house engine.
In addition to the control scheme, I designed and prototypes many of the game’s other gameplay mechanics. Some of these included:
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- Hanging vines for more vibrant levels
- Spinning gears for navigation challenges
- Rolling boulders and destructible tiles for dynamic levels
- Hinge doors for navigation challenges
- Floating islands for more vibrant levels
My responsibilities:
- Designing and prototyping the game’s control scheme
- Designing and prototyping some the game’s obstacles and hazards
- Level Design and Implementation
- Created 12 full levels for the game’s first world, Forests of Alvor
- Visual Scripting of mechanics for fast and iterative prototyping
- Control scheme
- Obstacles and hazards
- Texturing of placeholder assets
Play the game:
Download the game for iOS*
*The game is free of charge, but offers optional In-App Purchases.
Gameplay video of some my levels: