Snooze
Embedded Files
Story
Snooze is a game in which you play as a kid who’s parents recently bought them a new alarm clock which mysteriously awakes them in the middle of the night. It was developed through Scrappy Studios in Godot Engine.
I contributed the music and most of the Wwise implementation, including spatialization of sound effects.
Duck Kick Game (prototype)
duckkickgame.mp4Intro/Story
Duck Kick Game is a frustrating, jank piece of work physics platformer I designed for the class Intro to Visual Scripting for Games in Unreal Engine at the University of North Texas. It demonstrates the most basic blueprint functionality in animations, audio (again through Wwise), and flow between levels.
In the game, you get a glimpse into the life of Pato, a duck cursed with some sort of Sisyphean task of getting a ball into a futsal goal. Over and over. For eternity. Along the way, he has to deal with all manner of absurd geometry, absurd actors, such as a gun that sucks instead of shoots, and a hiveminded collective of crabs known as the Goalie. These actors may help or hinder Pato along his journey. Pato can run jump, kick, and quack his way into getting a GOOOOAAAAALLLL in!
Every asset in this game is either made by me, stock in-engine, or CC0.
Dynamics:
The core gameplay loop of this game is to push the ball into the goal.
Progression is made through several levels, each of which focus on particular dynamics of the level design, whether that be accuracy in pushing through narrow passages, tilted geometry causing the ball to slide away from you, several levels of height, moving between them, and moving the ball between them, causing additional difficulties, especially when the suck gun traps the ball on a level that Pato cannot reach by simply jumping.
The game should feel especially jank and frustrating; I wanted to capture the frustration of very difficult physics games like QWOP, I Am Bread, Surgeon Simulator, and Octodad. Games where the controls are a large part of the friction. My approach to the level design takes slight influences from the Super Monkey Ball series while embracing a more absurd and illogical approach to the geometry (often hewn from the most primitive elements stock in the engine)
Some Mechanics:
Kick: You walk into the ball to kick it.
Quack: You can press Q to quack.
Reload: You can press R to reload the level.
Also pictured is the way I keep the listener attached to Pato. I intend to have it attached to the camera in the future.
Suck Gun: The Suck Gun sucks in the soccer ball when the ball passes in front of it, pulling it towards a set position in front of it.
Goalie: The goalie moves in one direction, back and forth, switching between acting as a platform (as in the second level with the giant crabs) and an obstacle (as the goalie in front of the goal does in each level). This is achieved with a very simple InterpToMovement.
More will be added!
Comments on the MDA Framework
The MDA framework helped me when designing this game so I could categorize what I wanted aesthetically (an absurdist game like Goat Simulator), dynamically (a difficult physics game like Surgeon Simulator) and how to achieve that mechanically (use UE5 onboard physics, add simple yet versatile objects that change the way the player has to approach the levels, and then design the levels to hit the line between so difficult the player wants to quit and so easy that the level poses no challenge)
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