Reptile Rush was made for a three-week group project with 5 other students; it is the first mobile game we made. We focused on optimizing the game and on UI that can easily be used on mobile. It can be played here: Itch.io/ReptileRush
As the project leader on this project, I was responsible for keeping an overview of the project, the time planning, keeping track of everyone’s work, keeping everyone motivated and if necessary, conflict resolution. And as the lead designer I made the grey box, organized playtesting, adjusted the difficulty of the levels and assisted with other design work.
Concept
In this game, ‘Gecky’ is traversing a dangerous cave and is trying to get out as fast as possible, while trying to collect food on their way. Their only tool to traverse the perilous corridors is their grappling hook. The goal is to collect all the food and get to the end of the caves as quickly as possible.
Mobile Game Design
Because this game is for mobile, the game design is also different. The movement is based on player input that is easy to use on just a screen. The level design is adjusted in such a way that everything that’s important for the player to see fits on a tiny phone screen. The UI needs to be visible while the players hands are over part of the screen, but the buttons still need to be reachable with the limited movement a player has with their thumbs while holding a phone. placed the assets
Playtesting
We did two playtest sessions for this project. The first was check if the main movement mechanics worked well and were easy to use on mobile. We also checked if the two levels had a balanced difficulty. This was done by timing how long it took people to get through the levels. Once we’d worked on the results of that playtest, we did a second round of playtests. In that round, we checked if the previous issues were now gone and if new additions to the game worked well. Based on these playtests, we made changes: finetuning the movement, changing a levels difficulty, making the character a bit bigger, adding particles to the platforms that appear, etc.
Project Leader
This project was my second one as project leader, but it was the first time I had to solve difficult problems. The first problem was that one of my teammates started the project with a cold, which quickly got everyone too sick to work for an average of four days a person. This meant that I had to rearrange our priorities and our planning to fit the lower workload we could then bear. The four levels we had planned became two. Tasks with a high priority that were previously assigned to someone who got sick had to be reassigned. It was very chaotic, but we managed to finish the project in time.
The second problem was a teammate who was one to three hours late three times in one week. This meant that I had to have a talk with them about how to solve this. This resulted in an action plan to solve this problem and a formal warning to being kicked out of the group. This was a difficult conversation to have with someone, especially because we’re friends too, but they were on time the rest of the project.