i am your teddy

i am your teddy is a platformer with a narrative background. Teddy has been lost by a child in the forest and is trying to find his way back by following the trail of ribbons (at the end of each level). The game was made in collaboration with two animators and two game design students for a BA Games Design 2nd Year course.

My role: I was responsible for level design, UI design and implementation, animation programming and constructing narrative frame. Coding tasks, as well as designing state machines and mechanics were done in collaborating with the second game designer on the team. 

Link to the development process presentation:  https://prezi.com/view/zkWhpCxLfZF85PgzK5ZH/

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Development Process:

 Working with animators for the first time on our game, I am your Teddy, was a very challenging yet insightful experience. By learning about each other’s’ disciplines and discovering overlaps, we were able to expand our design and coding knowledge, as well as our teamwork skills. 

Regardless of the colliding disciplines, teamwork always comes with its own set of challenges. The team significantly improved its communication and decision-making tactics throughout the project’s duration. For example, the team struggled to settle on a theme in the initial design phase. For several weeks, we developed two ideas simultaneously, which decreased our efficiency. We finally decided to vote and chose the Teddy concept. Due to the efficacy of this tactic, we created a survey at a later instance to decide on an aesthetic for the game after struggling to consolidate our individual visions. Hence, it can be said that the team learned to make quick decisions throughout the duration of the project and evolved its strategies rapidly. 

Conversely, the interdisciplinary teamwork aspect of the project caused several communication issues. These were difficult to resolve, as their impact only became evident in the late stages of creating the game. Mainly, we found that animators and game designers work at vastly different paces. Animation, as a discipline, appears to be less iterative than game design. As a result, the game designers had to make decisions that were ahead of their schedule to aid the animators’ progression. This did not seem problematic at first, but because code needs to be perpetually readjusted, altered, and compromised, some animations no longer matched the mechanics by the time we were ready to implement them.
 This situation occurred with the running animation: The animator had created a winddown as well as a startup animation to frame the running animation, but when trying to implement the winddown, we found that the level design did not allow the character to run long enough distances. When implemented, the winddown looked disproportional to Teddy’s speed. Unfortunately, this type of occurrence meant that both animators and game designers created more work for each other and that not all sprite sheets and prototyped code could be used in the final product. 

We also learned a lot about teamwork between two game designers. From the beginning, both game designers were responsible for one of our two main mechanics, namely catapulting and climbing. This tactic was implemented to split the workload evenly. However, as soon as we began the “assembly” phase of the game’s construction, we were hindered by our different coding styles and incompatible codes. Our mechanics required different colliders and relied on conditions that inhibited one another. For example, the catapulting mechanic ended when the player collided with the ground, but the climbing mechanic relied on wall collisions. As a result, the catapulting mechanic’s code could not fully execute if the player transitioned from a flying state to a climbing state.
We were unfortunately not able to improve our tactic throughout this project and were forced to dedicate a lot of time to converting code or even entirely rewriting it. However, we discussed alternate tactics for future projects:
The first solution we devised was to assemble a full prototype of both mechanics working in tandem much earlier. Despite having all elements and mechanics in place weeks prior to the deadline, the game only became playable during the last week of production. If we had assembled our mechanics sooner, we would have had less patching to do and fewer variables to keep track of since the core of the code would have been functional from the start.
The second solution we discussed was to assign both mechanics to one person to completely circumvent incoherencies in the code. However, this could have potentially resulted in an unbalanced work distribution and would have excluded one person from the code entirely, causing them to lose their overview of the project. For these reasons, the first solution was deemed as the more reasonable one and we will attempt to implement it in future projects. 

I am your Teddy – Game Appraisal:

The game we created is a challenging and entertaining platformer level with a minor narrative element. The animators and game designers put great effort into designing a coherent concept.
Though we struggled with the execution of the mechanics, their design was quite successful with regard to what we wanted them to achieve. Our main aim was to avoid redundancy so that one mechanic would not overshadow the other in terms of usefulness and challenge. The climbing mechanic helps vertical movement whereas the catapult mechanic is intended for horizontal displacement and was deliberately designed to not propel the player high upwards. The climbing mechanic is restricted but precise, whereas the catapult mechanic is flexible but more difficult to control. Both mechanics rely on timing and thus present a physical challenge, namely releasing or pressing buttons at the right moment. The mechanics are thus coherent in theme but different in use.
Moreover, since Teddy was lost in a forest, we made sure that the mechanics did not revolve around extra tools that would not match his circumstances. Teddy uses his body to surmount obstacles, bridging mechanics and narrative.
Furthermore, the level design encourages the use of both mechanics and expands the challenges that each one presents. For example, the moving thorns coming in and out of walls amplify the timing challenge of the climbing mechanics, and the thorned moving platforms prevent players from using the catapult as a shortcut across the level.
Nevertheless, several areas in the game leave room for improvement. While the imprecision of the catapulting mechanic was intentional, it would have benefitted from fine-tuning. When Teddy is swinging, adding a marker to show roughly where Teddy would land would have been a significant improvement. The marker could have spanned several tiles in terms of width as to not reduce the contrast with the precise climbing mechanic. Another improvement would have been the addition of collectibles and a point system, which would have ensured re-playability.
Even though we faced significant difficulties during the making of I am your Teddy, we were able to create an interesting game with diverse challenges and a small narrative that brings our character, Teddy, to life with the player’s aid.