What I Learned
I made everything on this project except for the music, which was composed by a friend of mine: Raphaël Granjon.
Prison Wreck was my first serious video game project, I had already made a few games before this one, but this time the scope was huge compared to anything I had previously worked on.
This project also helped me understand the Unity engine, visual scripting, and coding logic, allowing me to bring my ideas to life.
Most importantly, it is the project that taught me the most for one simple reason: It was my first time making a complete game, which also means the first time doing: Feedback / Sounds / Juiciness / Complex code / Level Design.
Because of all the new things I had to learn, I hit many walls during development. I learned a lot from it and how to manage errors overall.
Concept
I wanted to combine the puzzle and platforming genres into very short gameplay sequences, all inside of a single fixed screen.
Phase 1 (Puzzle)
You have to hold your space key down, this will rotate the convict's ball around the prisoner. Releasing the space key will throw it. The goal is to aim for the cells' bars.
The menu is used as a tutorial to teach the throwing mechanic, the player has to throw the ball onto various buttons to navigate between levels and start a game.
Successfully breaking the cells' bars will trigger the transition into the second phase.
Phase 2 (Platform)
You play in the same area as the throwing phase during this phase. This time your goal is to reach the exit you made when you broke the cells' bars. To reach it you use what used to be obstacles in the throwing phase as platforms.
Successfully reaching the exit will trigger this level's end and the next one will start.
Level Design
Due to the base concept, each level had to be designed with a unique rule in mind: Every level had to work for both the puzzle phase and the platforming one.
A coin is in every level to enhance the mobile game aspect and the replayability of the game.
Here is how a level is usually completed, the blue line represents the throwing phase and the red one represents the platforming phase.
This was the hardest challenge I had to face. Making 15 levels with those constraints was quite hard. I'd say that level design took the most amount of time on this project.
Content
Coins
(Collectibles)
Bars
(Target)
Spikes
(Killzones)
Extra Levels
The third level of the game changes a bit. All the cells are only made of shadows, and half of the screen is hidden. It switches between both halves back and forth. Making it a lot harder for both gameplay phases.
Graphics & Music
Graphics
All the assets you can find in the game are made in 3D, but the camera is orthographic, which means it doesn't have depth, just like 2D games. This choice was made because of how practical it was to create levels. Most of the graphics efforts were put into various particles and cel shading.
What the player sees
How its made
Music
The music was composed by a friend of mine, Raphaël Granjon. You can listen to the game's soundtrack on his SoundCloud page.
Because the game is split into two phases, we made a soundtrack for each.
Throw phase
Escape phase
The music becomes more enthusiastic once you break the cell's bars and try to escape. This makes the second phase much more intense without actually adjusting its difficulty.
The third level has its own music, which isn't as intense because it takes place during the night/the level is made of shadows.
Throw phase
Escape phase
Retrospection
I consider Prison Wreck as my first real video game, and I'm quite proud of how it turned out. Friends and professors playtested the game and some of them seemed to really enjoy it.
It was also the first time I realized all of the elements that you need to take into account when making a game, as well as how long and how hard it is to make such elements.
What went wrong:
- The development was slow because I had to learn a lot from scratch.
- The amount of different levels you can theoretically make is limited.
- The game might lack level design elements.