A single person platformer with a mirror movement mechanic

Team

  • Jaekeun Ahn - Sound Designer / Level Designer
  • Arim Yoon - Artist
  • Rose Heid - Artist
  • Stephanie Fawaz - Programmer / Producer
  • Zhi Xin Lee - Programmer

Game

Smoke and Mirrors is a single player puzzle platformer controlling two twin princesses as the player characters, with the main mechanic being a mode switch in controlling their movement; either the princesses move identically, or they move in a mirror image of each other. 

The story premise of Smoke and Mirrors turns the typical rescue-the-princess story on its head. A prince goes to rescue two princesses from their stone tower, guarded by a dragon. Rather than save them, the prince gets captured by the dragon. The princesses, upon witnessing this, decide to save the prince, climbing down their tower to reach the dragon at the bottom. The player must use their two movement modes to solve puzzles to open doors, move platforms, and trick monsters to make it to the bottom and finally defeat the dragon.

Design

The Global Game Jam is an annual event that takes place at hundreds of sites around the world, where a team must come together and make a complete game experience based on a given theme within 48 hours. It is an extreme exercise in rapid production in prototyping, as brainstorming, design, pipelining, art and code creation, playtesting, and improved prototyping must all be completed within the 48 hour time limit. In the 2015 Global Game Jam, our theme was simply the phrase: "What do we do now?" 

When we began brainstorming for the game jam, our team of 5 tossed out around 30 ideas as fast as we could so we could have a large pool to find fun and compelling qualities in. To narrow down from there, we started going down our list of ideas and tried to come up with a main mechanic the game could have. We tossed away ideas that couldn't foster interesting mechanics that we thought would be fun. From what we had left there, we looked at which games had premises that we really liked and felt excited about creating a game for. In the end, we decided on a platformer with two player characters controlled by one person: Smoke and Mirrors.

My Role

I worked as the producer and one of the programmers on my game jam team. I kept track of official emails from the GGJ management staff, kept track of time to manage our team's progress, and organized our build and game descriptions into the format GGJ requested. I also put in all the level design elements into the scene according to our designer's paper prototypes, coded the AIs for the monsters and final dragon boss, and integrated the art and sound into the main game scene. Since I put in most of the level design elements into the scene, I did most of our informal playtesting, as well as get other playtesters in to see how intuitive our design elements were.