CROSSING
CROSSING
CROSSING
MICHAEL KIRBY
PARALLEL WORLDS ON THE RUN!
Parallel Worlds on the Run! is a pixel art endless runner game where you play as an agent traveling through parallel worlds, armed with a dimensional beam gun and jet pack, cleaning up the mess left behind by bugged dimensional monsters.
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This was part of a small game jam called Pixel Art Game Jam, where the theme was ‘Parallel Worlds.’ We were a team of three: a programmer (Jeroen Kornips), a sound designer (Jess Buscema), and an artist (myself). Having previously worked together on The PolterHeist, we were familiar with each other’s strengths, which greatly benefited the project. All assets were created individually. I primarily worked on the pixel art, designing characters, animations, and level assets, while the team collectively contributed to game design and produced a one-page game design document.
We drew inspiration from Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time, particularly its gameplay mechanic of phasing between parallel worlds, which became a key feature of our game.
LANE DESIGNS & PLACEMENTS
For this game jam project I primarily worked on the art, UI and animations. I did however contribute to the design of the gameplay mechanics along with my team mates, I also developed a lane breakdown plan to explore how many lanes the game would have for platforms and enemies to spawn in.
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The images in the left gallery showcase two different versions of lane breakdowns and two example plans of what the levels would look like if they populated with platforms. I also showed what type of platforms would go where in each of the lanes. After making version 1 of the breakdown and example, I could see straight away that the level would become overcrowded with platforms. So I solved this problem by make second versions of the breakdown and example plan with only three lanes. This seemed to have sorted the problem and gives players more space.
Once I finished making the placement example of the platforms, I then had to expand upon that for the enemies placements within the levels and what types would go where. For this I only made one version because after showing my two other team mates the two versions of the lanes breakdown. we all agreed the three lane one was more effective for what we needed. So it made making the placement of the enemies a lot easier to explore.
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Overall this was a very useful bit of planning to design so that our programmer would have a strong idea on where the spawners should go, without wasting time constantly moving around and tweaking code to get the results we wanted.
GALLERY
Below are a selection of gameplay images.
