Role
Design
About the Game
A game jam made in a week about the theme "Growth". Vine Rider is a platformer that gives unique freedom to the player to grow his own platforms either horizontally or vertically. We also feature a teleportation seed so the player can skip across areas he might be stuck on.
What went right
The quick implementation by our programmers was really amazing. The game got its main mechanics of platforms within 2 days. Drawing the levels on paper worked perfectly as we transitioned from graph paper to the TileD editor.
What went wrong
When the designers were first concepting the game it was originally going to be a very different game, a kind of novel tower defense resource management game. While I don't hate the original vine rider idea, it probably wouldn't have been as fun because of the novelty new idea it was. A lot of people didn't really get the idea and wanted to change it to a platformer. If we had some way to show the gameplay with a paper prototype rather than a GDD, it would've been easier to get what the game we were making would look like.
The overall feel of the game was meant to be inside a cave. I felt that some parts of the cave could've tried harder to pretend to be a cave. There are a lot of improvements that could be made and I mention the rest in my commentary.
Silent Playthrough
A silent playthrough by the team's lead programmer: Brendan.
Commentary Playthrough
Used:
C#
XNA
TileD