Game Overview
Puzzle Platform was created by Milo Fisher and Alexander Robert and was made for the Game Design Studio class at UC Santa Cruz. In this game, the player controls a floating paddle, with which they must use to help the purple character move safely through each level. This game was designed for a project allowing only one button of player input, so the player does everything by moving the mouse, clicking, or holding a click. The player's paddle is rotated on a click, and will materialize instead if the mouse is held down. The player may use the paddle as a platform for the character to walk over, or as a wall to redirect the character away from danger. In each level, there are various traps and objects that the player must utilize or maneuver around in order to complete the level. The levels are procedurally generated from predefined tilemaps, and while there are only a few test levels at the moment, all that is required to add more levels is to simply draw more level tilemaps and import them.
This image shows a level full of bounce pads where the character must make it to either teleporter in order to progress.
This image shows a level where the character climbs up and will fall into spikes if the player does materialize the platform above the spikes
My Contributions
On this project, I was the level designer and programmer. This game was made in an arcade game library called the Crisp Game Library, which came with numerous affordances for rapid game development such as mouse click input, color based collision detection, sound effects, background music, and a 5x5 sprites creator. Using color based collision I implemented the functionality of each of the level objects, such as the teleporters, jump pads, spike traps, arrow traps, and end flag. Beyond the provided affordances of the game library, I also designed and implemented a level sequence generation and a camera panning effect to subsequent rooms. Additionally, I created an interpreting function for importing files from the tilemap editor Tiled, which I then used to import our levels. To make levels, I first create them in Tiled, then I export them to our project folder, where the interpreter translates the JSON file into a complete level, spawning the game objects and all. Because our team only had 2 weeks to make this game prototype, I focused primarily on creating a scalable system for adding levels, rather than designing engaging levels. The level generation takes the entrance and exit direction of a room, using those values to find a valid room from the rooms list which can then be drawn.
It should be noted that the game library we used is not well optimized for games with many components that need to be drawn and moved frequently. To combat this, I had to take certain precautions when stepping beyond the affordances of the library. For the room generation, I only generate the player's current and next room at a time, destroying any previously generated rooms to improve performance. For the camera panning I implemented, I had to create a global positional offset for every object in order to move them around the screen, simulating the movement of a camera.
Here is the tilemap editor, Tiled, which I used to design our levels. The levels are then exported as JSON file which is used as a blueprint for drawing the levels in game.
