Concept Statement
The early intent of Short Giraffe was to create a humorous experience using neck based physics to create interesting platforming experiences for the player.
Game
Short Giraffe is a playfully absurd 2.5D platformer with a unique movement neck-canic. Playing as Agent G, players can extend and retract their neck to traverse the world. The Meerkats are out to ruin the world, players must find the Meerkats to discover their dastardly doings. As Agent G, players will investigate the Meerkat plot from the savanna to the freezing arctic. With seven uses for the neck, this mechanized mammal is well equipped to stop the growing Meerkat threat. Short Giraffe offers players a light-hearted atmosphere that delivers a series of complex puzzles.
My Role
This is my reel where I describe how we implemented puzzles in the game Short Giraffe.
My role on Short Giraffe was to come onto the team as the lead systems and technical designer. My job on the team consisted of communicating between the programmers and the other designers to implement lots of new mechanics into the game! My main job on the team consisted of overseeing how we built our puzzles as well as building them and each mechanic they consist of. Our level pipeline consisted of the two level designers on the team creating a white boxed level. Then, once the the level is white boxed, I would go through each level and set up each puzzle and link up each puzzle element together. After confirming that the puzzle works and is beatable I would then move through to the next level. Because of this pipeline, we were able to get two full levels white boxed, with all of the puzzles hooked up, with semi-final art done, and tested per week.
Bosses
Along with with putting the puzzles into the levels, my other task was to spearhead the development of what we called “set pieces” on the team. When I came onto the team I wanted to add another element to the game that shook up the game play a little bit from what the player was used to. While playing any regular level in short giraffe the player can go at their own pace. However, I wanted to add an extra challenge for the player to deal with once they have hit certain mile stones in their journey throughout the game.
Prototype of our original boss: The Cheetah
Originally, these set pieces were meant to be boss battles, where players would use their neck in combination with the environment in some way to defeat these bosses. We had planned to have four bosses which all were all different in how they went after the player. I prototyped two scenarios to do a feasibility test of each one. The first scenario was with the preemptively named cheetah boss. This one was considered the “horizontal boss” because we wanted this boss encounter to take place on a horizontal plane while our second boss battle was considered the “vertical boss” because we wanted too see how feasible a boss would be on a constantly moving upwards stage.
The cheetah boss fight had multiple phases. The boss would charge on the ground towards the player while the player would have to bait them into one of the walls on either the left or right side of the play space. Once the boss is charging towards the player, the player would then reach up to one of the branches above and then pull themselves up. If the boss charges into the wall, the boss will then become stunned for a set time. During this time, the player must fall onto the the top of the boss to damage them. Once the player did this three times, the player would trigger the next battle phase where the cheetah boss would then jump while charging, creating more importance for the players positioning.
We tested this encounter as well as the vertical encounter and we found that the vertical encounter did not play well at all. It was too fast for the player to keep up if they didn’t keep up with the pace of the level despite lots of tuning. We decided to scrap it quickly. When it came to the horizontal encounter with the cheetah, it definitely played better, but testers ended up getting too confused about what to do. As a team we decided that we still really liked that extra element that the bosses brought to the game but in their current form didn’t feel like they quite fit with the rest of the game and were too divergent. This was not the only reason though, we ended up having to scope down our ambitions for bosses as we got further along in the semester due to lack of time creating four fully rigged creatures.
Testing Player Expectations
We decided to switch gears and make two boss encounters, both of which are chases. This fit better into the established player expectations of what Short Giraffe “is” as a puzzle platformer. Players would be chased by “The Don”, the head honcho Meerkat through a linear level. These moments helped deliver crucial story moments to the player while providing players a tense challenge akin to forcing the player into a time limited scenario. This proved to be much more popular with testers as it was much easier for them to understand in the end. We continued down this route for both encounters. In the second encounter, our final level, the player must also deal with zero gravity while within space. This means the player must be very careful about their positioning while also doing their mad dash towards the end of the level. This allowed me to still instill the player with the same principles during the encounter while also being more streamlined.
While those were the big things that I contributed to the project, there were other smaller things that I did as well. I helped come up with the initial implementation of the jet pack as a mechanic for our space levels, helped make particle effects, created our end cut scene, and did lots other smaller things that needed to get done.
Project Duration and Platform
Windows PC with controller support
Two Semesters - (My time on the project: January 2018- Present)
Team
Joseph Martelucci - Lead Design, Level Design
Christine Brumbaugh - Lead Design, Level Design
Josh Lanham - Narrative Designer
Dylan Alter - Systems and Technical Designer
Dylan Gooley - Lead Artist
Ellie Peak - Artist, Animator
Julia Wolniewicz - 2D Artist
JT Woodside - Co-Producer
Alex Dalton - Co-Producer
Lucas Spiker - Backend Programmer
Jack Malvey - Tools Programmer
Connor Breen - UI Programmer
