Game Jam projects
From 2018 to 2020, I started learning hands-on game design by participating in game jams. As I gained experience, it slowly became my full-time profession. The projects below are a result of this learning process, including the award-winning game Unhackneyed.
The World That Once Was is a top-down puzzle game with Sokoban elements, in which a robot has the mission to recover artifacts from Latin American culture and store the information in digital media, restoring memories of a lost past. The player must be mindful of the robot's energy spent, finding the optimal path to collect the artifacts and reach the data terminal.
Hispanic Heritage Month Jam 2020
Roles and Duties: Game Designer, responsible for:
Designing game mechanics
Level design
Narrative
2D art of artifacts
This project was developed in one month with a team that got together online to participate in the Hispanic Heritage Month Jam 2020, a game jam hosted by LatinX Gaming. After the games’ were submitted they were showcased on the online event Unidos, on Twitch. The World That Once Was got a highlight on the live show as the judges appreciated:
The combination of mechanics
The level design
The take on Latin American culture in a future setting.
We started designing the game from the vision and narrative, before defining the genre and mechanics. The idea of taking the game jam’s theme to the future came from a speculative design approach, which consists in thinking of possible future scenarios and their implications on humanity and technology to design.
Level mockup
Final result
Level Design
Since the robot's movement is tile-based, the levels were built using a tilemap. When designing each level, I started defining which gameplay elements they would have and drawing arrows on paper to define the optimal path I wanted the level to have. Only then I would figure out the position of the objects and the shape of the map.
We could playtest and receive feedback while the levels were still on paper. This process made it possible to quickly iterate on the levels before they were implemented in the engine.
Contact
Feel free to reach out. I would appreciate a coffee chat!
E-mail: ana.carolina.m.franca@gmail.com