See You Laser
You can play the game here!
For my third semester at the UE Berlin I had to create a game each week, and this game was made for the theme "Physics". At this point I already had a bunch of weekly games behind me and I saw a pattern emerge: My games tended to be more narrative/experience driven artsy games. And I did all the code on my own - even though I didn't consider myself a coder, I just teamed up with people even less confident in their coding capabilities. So for this iteration I wanted to both work on something gameplay oriented and I wanted to work with someone on my level at coding, i.e. neither no experience nor zero confidence. So I called up my friend and fellow student Marie Wispler!
We started out by discussing different directions of the "Physics" theme. We thought about fun tilting jigsaw puzzles, the crazy stuff quantum physics can do but ended up looking into lasers - at the time I was experimenting a bunch with lasers at home! I had a pretty clean top down puzzle in mind, and we chose to go 2D as Marie felt more comfortable drawing this way. The idea was to have a drag and drop casual puzzle game, something we've both seen many times done in many different ways. We had a clear idea of the workflow and what needed to be done! Marie especially helped organise that workflow by doing to-do lists and protocolling discussions, letting me understand the importance of project management even in small scale production.
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Our brainstorming on the online whiteboard miro
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While I felt in the end that this project wasn't necessarily as large or as ambitious as other projects in this weekly gamejam, I am very proud of our general work structure and flow. This was by far the best organised project, there were no points of incredible stress, no night shifts - and I am very happy with what we ended up with! We created a game that is easy to iterate upon, as the laser code is built in a way that is very malleable. It has a distinct art style and some first levels teaching the player how to play.
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The moodboard, taking cues from Portal and Minimalism
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