Game & Site Work in Progress
I Need Coffee
Overall Design
Describing the game and its parts
This game is inspired by an itch.io’s game jam that I couldn’t participate in it because of how late I would have joined. However, I went along with it and made a game with the game jam’s theme of “heal” in mind.
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I Need Coffee is a first-person puzzle/platformer game in which the player must retrieve coffee from the other side of the level and bring it to their coworker who’s in dire need of some energy! However, the office has been trashed and many items are blocking some hallways. The player must navigate through this office maze to get to the coffee and bring it back in the quickest time possible.
Level Overview
Describing the level and thought process when coming up with it
Original Sketch
The original sketch of the level is trying to resemble a typical large office level with multiple small offices, and a kitchen.
Graybox of Sketch
The graybox of the sketch above.
The first thing to fix was some spacing issues from the sketch. Walls were too close/far away from some of the offices, huge hallways in which props would not be able to fill in, what exactly each office space should hold.
Final Version
Finalized version of the level with environmental detail. I went through a lot of iteration when trying to figure out what type of obstacles and where to place the obstacles. There were many times where placing a certain type of obstacle didn’t make sense because most players would just go around it through some other room instead of interacting with them.
The assets were made by Synty Studios.
Coffee
What's coffee even used for?
Coffee
The item that the player has to get for their coworker. It's located in the kitchen on the other side of the office level.
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As long as the player gets near the coffee, they will automatically pick it up. This is so the game flow of traversing through the level quickly is not slowed down because the player has to press a key to pick up something.
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I also added a light-blue ring around the coffee to make it more noticeable for the player when they are speeding through the area.
Goal
What is the player's goal and what can they do
Friendly Office Worker
The player's friendly office coworker is located next to the spawn location of the player by the start.
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The goal of the game is to bring person's coffee located on the other side of the office. The player cannot interact with the office worker in any way without it.After the player collected the coffee, all they have to do is to get near the coworker for the level to finish.
Much like the coffee description above, the player doesn't have to press a key to interact with the coworker. Since the game is all about getting the coffee in the quickest time possible, adding a button interaction would only slow down the gameplay.
Obstacles
What is stopping the player from reaching their goal
The player must traverse through a series of obstacles. These obstacles fit into 1 of 3 categories: two-way obstacle, one-way obstacle, and completly blocked.
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Two-Way Obstacle
These types of obstacles are more so to make the player slow down a tiny bit. It also works to decelerate some players since it requires the player to go over it or go around it.
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This obstacle was only used once since it essentially acts as a speed bump for the player. Placing it somewhere else would make it act as a stair step for climbing over other obstacles that are not intended to be climbed.
One-Way Obstacle
These obstacles make the player think twice about where they are going. The player will cross one of them and then realize that they can't go back the way they came from. This will have an effect on later runs and different paths might be taken to optimize the best path towards the coffee and back.
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These obstacles were tricky to figure out where to place them. There were many times where I would place down an obstacle, only to find that it made another area much easier/harder to traverse. I also didn't want to block off entire areas of the map, so that was something else that I had to think about.
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These obstacles were created with a clear path that the player could take to climb over them. For example, one of these obstacles has a ramp placed on the side of the obstacle that would be first seen by the player (the left side of the hallway). The other one has small boxes that act like stairs and allows the player to jump over the obstacle. It's also more than likely the first obstacle that players would encounter. This was intended to get the players familiarized with the mechanic and could already start thinking about how they would act on later runs.
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Ideally, most paths are optimal to take and it's up to the player to find the fastest one out of all of them.
Blocked Crossing
This type of obstacle was created to completely block a path. They were placed in key locations that would compel the player to explore the level a bit and find the best path they can find. One of these locations is in the middle hallway of the map. Knowing that the most optimal route towards something is a straight path, cutting through the level with the middle hallway is faster than any other path. So the blocked-type obstacle was placed there to stop the player from just following the shortest path.
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Changing the type of these obstacles to either one-way or two-way would make the level too easy to complete.
