emBARK

emBARK was the first full game I ever worked on. It was made in my Traditional Game Development class back in Fall 2021 by me and 6 other people. The game is a simple 2D platformer, heavily inspired by Celeste, where you play as a dog traveling deeper into a greenhouse.

This being the first game I ever worked on, it was a massive learning experience for me. I acted primarily as a level designer for the project. Working with others on creating level maps that our engineers would then put into the engine. I also did a lot of playtesting, whether it was on my own spending hours getting to the root of various glitches, or overseeing playtests and taking notes on player feedback.

I personally feel like I've grown a lot since working on this game, and if I could I'd go back and change a lot about this game (mainly making levels that are more balanced around the zoomed in camera), but it's an important milestone in my career as a game developer.

You can play the game for free here: https://clothmanz.itch.io/embark

Level Design Process

emBARK had a very collaborative design process. Every week, me and two others would each draft up some level mockups drawn in Photoshop or on grid paper. We'd then meet up and go over everyone's levels, find what we liked from each level design, and then we'd combine the best piece of everyone's levels into one concise level map. Our engineer would then put that design into the engine. Due to this process, it's difficult to pinpoint what exactly were a lot of my contributions in each individual level as well as a lot of level maps being lost due to being drawn on white boards. You can see some of the level maps below.

While some levels it's hard to see my contribution, others were very much so my design. Those levels being 2-3 and 3-3 (ironically both vertical levels). Only minor changes were made to them. In 2-3 the ending segment with the spike pillars was removed for balancing purposes, and so was the permeable platform in the middle of the level that got removed as well due to us just not liking the permeable platforms. The only change in 3-3 was removal of the beginning portion, it was originally pitched as a level with a rising spike floor, but due to development time we had left, that part of the level was scrapped, and so the beginning portion was turned into a spike pit the player had to dash over since we didn't want to waste the players time with empty hallways.

Level 2-3 Concept

Level 3-3 Concept