Matthew Gai
KickBack
A first-person platformer collect-a-thon where you have a pogo stick as your right leg and a gun as your left leg.
The Pitch
After being banished by an evil dream wizard to an odd dimension in the sky, you will explore oddly familiar environments to recover your fragmented memories. Use your pogo leg to bounce around and various different guns to help dispatch enemy robots. Collect all the memory fragments to break the wizard's curse and wake up!
This fantastical idea came about after prototyping with the game Garry's Mod. The idea was so absurd and interesting that I really pushed for it to be the game we made for our capstone project. Ultimately, the game was selected, and together with 11 others, we were able to make a game we were all very proud of.
Key Contributions
- Level Design: Built the main level in Unity, handling layout, colliders, and material assignment for the entire game.
- Creative Direction: Managed the project vision for a 12-person team, maintaining the GDD and adjusting scope weekly in collaboration with the producer.
- Audio: Composed and produced original looping music tracks.
The Movement
By far the biggest draw for our game is the movement system. This took a very long time to get right, and a lot of iteration to get something that felt fun and fluid. Essentially, how it works is that the player can only use their movement abilities while in the air. This means the player first has to jump before shooting or pogoing. Once in the air, the player can either shoot with LMB, or pogo with RMB. By holding down RMB, the player will hold their leg out and bounce off any surface they are looking at. If they press RMB right before hitting the ground, however, they get a perfect pogo shown by the gold particles that emit and the player gets launched even further. Players can then fire their gun leg, providing a large amount of knockback which can help in gaining speed or height. In order to reload the gun, the player must then pogo, creating a loop where the player frequently alternates between the two legs to platform.
Initially, I wanted air movement to be very restrictive, making the pogo much more committal. This would allow the gun more precedence in the movement loop. However, players were frustrated by the lack of freedom and the difficulty to move where they wanted.
A distant view of the main island.
The World
After some testing, we found that players were most engaged with an open "playground" approach to level design. This meant creating a sandbox for players to use and find their own fun in. With how freeing the movement felt, confining players to linear levels felt awkward.
A Memory Fragment on a crane.
Gallery
Below are some screenshots of the Overworld throughout different stages of development, along with some light modeling work I did.
Play the Game
The game is available to play on Itch.io
Play on Itch.io