Shapes With Clyde

Overview

Description: Shapes With Clyde is a 2D platformer built in MonoGame. You play as a circle & square tasked with completing levels alongside your companion Clyde!

Problem is, we haven’t paid Clyde (he’s an intern), so he’s refusing to work. You need to solve each level while dragging Clyde to the finish line! You have access to 2 shapes depending on the level. The circle can spin to the left or right, but cannot jump. The square can’t move normally; instead they must compress themselves to launch towards a direction.

This project was created for IGME-106: Game Development & Algorithmic Problem Solving 2.

Project Length: February 2024 – April 2024

My Contribution

For this project, I was our Level Designer and Tools Programmer. I worked to create levels, as well as the tools we used for level design & development.

As tools programmer, it was my responsibility to create an application that allowed us to quickly develop levels and export them for use in the game itself.

I created a level editor with Visual Forms. Each cell represents a point of space that the designer could add a game object to. Once the level was completed, the player would also be able to save to a .Clyde file. This file would be read by the game to generate a level.

I created the introductory and intermediate levels for Shapes with Clyde. My primary goal was to introduce the concepts of the game in an understandable order. As development continued and we iterated upon the levels they became more difficult, to the point that many players would struggle on the first level. This taught us a valuable lesson to consistently bring in new play testers, as those who have tested our games before were not coming in with fresh eyes and would underestimate the difficulty of our levels.