Dr Deckyl and Mr Joe

Deckyl and Joe

This was the first of many assignments for my Master course.

The assignment was to create a mobile infinite runner and we're also tasked to make a group of 5 that we would be staying with for the remainder of the year, this how Studio One was formed.

After learning each others strength and weaknesses in Studio One we decided to brainstorm ideas while looking that the current popular infinite runners we quickly realised most, if not all, had very simple mechanics/controls.

The team found themselves liking a game idea where you could change the size, when you're in a small state you can jump but get blocked by obstacles and when you're in a large state you can break through these obstacles but unable to jump. simple mechanics but allows for interesting controls.

We like the idea of adding a powerup card system, the player would collect cards throughout the game and then the player could combine multiple cards to upgrade them.

One of the members made the comparison of our character mechanic to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde so as a tribute the team named the game after Dec and Joe and their forward Dr Deckyl and Mr Joe was born.

The way I decided to tackle the 'infinite runner' mechanics would be instead of randomly spawning in obstacles for the player to avoid I would use blocks of levels that will randomly spawn.

I wanted to make a tool that would help with the creating a level block, I thought the best way would be to create a custom level editor, in hindsight this was a pretty bad idea, especially when we had 12 weeks to make the game.

The level editor worked as intended, you can create levels incredibly quick.. it just took a lot longer to create than I originally thought. we learned a valuable lesson, not to create large custom tools with a short deadline, I do enjoy making these tools as they usually save time in the long run just not enough to make it worthwhile in these assignments.