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Pollen

Platformer 2D

 Febuary 2020-June 2020

Pollen is my first experience in video game design on Unity. We were a team of 5, consisting of 3 game designers and 2 game artists, and the development lasted for 4 months.

It is a 2D action platformer, where the player plays as Pollen a lost creature looking for their familly. The game consists of a series of workshops that put your controller mastery into practice.

What I did

  • Designing the 3C's, with a focus on character features

  • Designing interactive elements

  • Unity Level Design integration

  • Coding some features

  • Implementing environmental storytelling

What I learned

  • Writing Game Design Documents

  • Getting acquainted with Unity, especially tilemaps and the UI

  • Basics of C# 

  • Communication among team members, especially between designers and artists

Platforming mechanics

Pollen has a core mechanic of being able to glide. All additional features had to serve a purpose for this mechanic.

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Here some features that I was able to design and code, even though I don't intend to be a programmer; it allowed me to grasp the basics of programming. 

Bouncing platforms

Platforms that allow Pollen to jump hier.

Retractable platform

Platforms that retract as soon as Pollen steps on them, returning shortly afterward

Air blowers

The blowers are plants that project wind, allowing Pollen to fly when gliding through the currents.

Door

When Pollen walks in front of a switch, it opens the door it is connected to.

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Level design using Unity

Using a paper layout of the Level from one of my teamates and several tilemaps from the artists, I integrated the entire Level Design in Unity.

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During the integration process, I did intern playtests and made some modifications in certain areas to make navigation smoother and simplify workshops that could be too hard.

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I also implemented scripted events, such as doors or secret areas...

Pollen gameplay

Universe

Lore

"Pollen" takes place on a distant exoplanet, where the fauna and flora are even more diverse than that of Earth. Quickly, humans attempted to establish scientific colonies to study extraterrestrial life. One particular species captured the researchers' attention: a zoophyte species, part-animal, part-plant.

Awakening long after the rest of its kind, Pollen must find a way to reach the laboratory to reunite with its peers while avoiding the dangerous fauna of this planet, which has become too unstable for humans, leading to their hasty evacuation.

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This project allowed me :

  • To understand the stages of video game creation, in order to make my first full video game

  • To learn how to do level design, with a focus on balancing an already playable level

  • To realize it's better to have less content but make it polished

  • To learn the basics of programming

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