ROLES

Game Designer

2D & 3D Artist

RESPONSIBILITIES

Gameplay & Systems Design
UI Design
2D & 3D Asset Production
Playtesting Facilitation & Note-Taking

Team Size - 5

Development Time - 8 Months

Status - Complete

Project Description

Mind Over Penguins is a 2D top-down, competitive minigame collection. Players figuratively and literally collide in local co-op as they maneuver penguins through icy environments. Combat is thrilling, and chilling, with several snowball powerups to snag and shoot at each other.

The game was designed and developed by REALMakers, our small team of 5 designers, over 8 months.

Check It Out On Itch.io!

Design Process Work

UI/menu flow

This diagram roughly maps out the navigational flow between menus in the game from a player perspective. It was done quickly so our team could assess which menus/screens were needed and how they connected to each other.

Gameplay & Level Design

I sketched some of the early mockups for MOP's control scheme and gameplay. Each of our team members made similar sketches. We discarded the waddling & auto-acceleration idea in favour of another team member's movement design which showcased drifting and icy terrain. The control scheme still fit however.

The chaotic nature of the penguins' movement lead us to develop additional gamemodes and eventually Mind Over Penguins became a minigame collection.

Penguin control scheme sketches & diagrams. These were created back when Mind Over Penguins was originally just a racing game.

Unused King of Penguin Mountain & unnamed snowball fight gamemode map sketches.

Menus & UI elements

I drew some rough mockups of what the main menu and minigame menus would look like. I also designed the minigame pop-ups and UI elements.

Initial main menu concept.

Concepts for the in game UI that indicates player placements and score feedback.

The original concept for a minigame tutorial screen.

A mockup of the minigame tutorial prompt.

Initial minigame menu concept.

A later, more refined, concept for the minigame selection menu.

2D & 3D Assets

Challenges

When On A Deadline, Use What You Can

One challenge I encountered while creating assets for Mind Over Penguins was 3D modelling the fish for Salmon Chasers. At the time, I was less experienced as a 3D asset artist. This, combined with scheduled deliverables, meant that I had little time to fiddle with a model that wasn't meeting my expectations for the game's style.

Since our game was 2D, I told my team about the issue and offered a solution so I could still meet deadlines. I drew and animated a 2D fish asset in place of a model and it ended up influencing the game's style going forward.

If our game had been 3D, I would have asked my team if there were any allowances in our task breakdown so I could spend time learning the skills necessary to complete my tasks.

Takeaways

JIRA Management

Using JIRA for task management was a first. Although I had to make an effort to adapt to the new tool, I now have experience with it going forward.

UI & UX Design

This project gave me the opportunity to refine more of my UI and UX design skills. I tried out some different approaches for this project so I have a wider repertoire to draw from in the future.

3D to 2D Asset Production

In order to create the spinning snowball asset, I created a 3D model and animated it in Blender. The animation was exported as a series of PNGs which could be compiled in a PSD file and imported into the Unity game engine as a 2D sprite.

Developed @ Sheridan College - 2023

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