Cardinal Escape
A mini metroidvania where players find and master four super abilities to escape a space ship controlled by an anthropomorphic cardinal and his robot minions.
Concept
The original concept was to create a Metroidvania with the space-themed asset pack. Players would unlock different challenges in various parts of a spaceship, based on permanent abilities they collected.
To ensure responsive control, I reprogrammed parts of the character controller to include variable jump height, fast falling, and air resistance.
I brainstormed many ideas for potential abilities but chose four that could be combined in interesting ways.
Because there were four abilities, I decided to assign each to a cardinal direction and mapped them to the keyboard like a diegetic space control panel. The cardinal directions became a recurring motif.
Level Design Iteration
At the start of the process, my overall goal was to create a cross-shaped spaceship map, where each direction would correspond to an ability that players would unlock in this section.
On the first pass, I noticed playtesters had a lack of direction and confusion in sections, like repeatedly trying to go to a place where it was supposed to be obvious they could not go without certain abilities.
To give more purpose to the sections, I created a diagram with all possible combinations of abilities and designed in-game challenges that would require a combination of those abilities.
I designed of each section show the player the use case of the ability they were about to unlock. For example, the Mech Maze was full of enemies in tight hallways that are difficult to defeat without the Volt Surge ability.
On the second pass, I leaned into the themes and shortened the sections. Through the layout of the level, I made it impossible to access the checkpoints within the sections, unless they were completable with the current abilities.
