The Other Side

Overview

Role: Generalist Game Designer

Project Lifetime: August 2021 – December 2021

Team Size: Solo Project

Engine: Unity

Screenshots

Description

The Other Side is a single-player grid-based puzzle game where players take the role of a rogue chicken navigating through the harsh human-infested world to save your chicken brethren. This chicken won’t just be crossing roads this time, as the chicken players control is the Demichicken, a powerful chicken with demonic powers. Using a limited number of demon attacks such as “meteor” and “smite”, players will be tasked with maximizing their potential to save as many chickens as possible throughout various levels.

Design Process

The Other Side to started its development as a Unity 3D mobile game, picking up after an older iteration as a 2D Unity game. I immediately went to create an overhauled comprehensive documentation to support my design ideas. By the end of this session, I had created a completed game design document research in order to better understand mobile puzzle games and their market. This documentation would be updated throughout the course of development to assure it was up to date. Many important changes ended up rising in this phase outside of the change to 3D including: A complete rebalance of the power ups, reintroduction of a scrapped traffic light mechanic, and adding chickens to rescue throughout the level that provide a 0-3 ranking like other mobile puzzle games in the market

As I began work in Unity, my first goal was simply to reach the same end product as my previous iteration of The Other Side in 2D. This iteration featured grid-based movement, enemy cars to dodge, 3 powers with limited uses, and any important menus (start, level clear, using powers, pause). A much more future-proof movement system was used to allow for easy level design, as well as sound implementation since that was another major shortcoming of the original The Other Side prototype. Finally, I took this final prototype of The Other Side and implemented any remaining features required for the full gameplay loop, these features being the traffic lights, rebalancing the power ups, and the star ranking.

Once this process was done I moved onto the part of the project that largely consisted of level design, in which I created 3 proof-of-concept levels. These levels intended to prove the design of a tutorial level, a level early in the game, and a level that would appear further into the game. In order for these levels to work, a new level select screen was created along a unique menu system that allowed you to navigate the 3D space using just touch screen inputs. Finally, any remaining audio was added to assure a fully complete player experience. The end product was a mobile-game prototype with 3 playable levels, playable in its entirety on mobile devices.