Puzzsoft
For the final, year long project of my Bachelor's Degree of Game Design I teamed up with 3 friends and made PuzzSoft, a fictional company that let our team make really strange design and marketing decisions under the guise of being an out of touch 90s software company. I was officially the "Technical Lead" of the project, though I also did a lot of level design. Our roles were essentially as fictional as the company, we all did everything.
Our project, Trail Mix, is a co-op puzzle platformer with the goal of forcing the people playing to communicate in order to progress.
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It was featured in GDC2020's Experimental Gameplay Workshop and was an Honorable Mention for the Student IGF Award. We were gonna get to go to San Francisco but then, y'know, 2020 happened.
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It ended up getting 10k+ downloads on itch.io, with a perfect 5 star rating and a bunch of lovely comments!
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It's been let's played in Russian & Chinese, speed-ran, and raged at by various people all over the internet, which has been a really fun experience as a designer!
Our design process was inspired by a Jonathan Blow talk about exploratory design. We diverged and converged with our ideas many times before settling on our final idea.
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This process has been documented by us on our dev logs. If you want to read more about the game check out my dev logs on the level design and metrics and all that fun stuff here.
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We also have our own website and twitter which continue to perpetuate the fictional brand.
Prior to working on this big long project, we did a ton of game jams together to nail down our workflow, art styles, and to get a feel for what kind of designs we liked. We came up with some crazy games during that period and I'm still quite proud of them:
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Nerd Bus was an in-browser arcade game that got 2nd place in 'Back-to-School Jam'
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Impermafrost is a puzzle platformer about worms and hexagons that also got a solid 2nd place in art in "Paint Jam"
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Proximi3 was made in a particularly strange way: It's made of 3 games, which each of us worked on sequentially, exquisite corpse style. This one wasn't for a competition but it's still 2nd place in our hearts
We plan to do more work together some time in the future too, so stay tuned for that!