Michael Kleinbriel
Game Developer | Animator | Programmer

3PLE: Raccoon World

Made for MI 330

Now, this was a very interesting map to make and the final result is pretty weird. Nevertheless, I had a blast making this map and I believe it to be some of my best work (at least for platforming levels I've made). The player controller and assets were not made by me, all I made was the level. Anyways, the theme that I was going for was for it to feel like the player was in a weird world. There's 4 parts of the map with weird people and a giant racoon god who will destroy the world if he doesn't get his trash.

A big challenge that I gave myself for this level was to make a level that feels like everything is connected. Another challenge was to make an actual platforming level that was fun to play. I tried my best to make the story of the level feel wacky while also having the gameplay be unique. I also reused some assets and scripts to make my own prefabs. This is mainly seen with the "NPCs" which the player can talk to, they just have invisible signs in them. The point of having the NPCs was to provide a method for the madness. One area has you collect coins because a mom's son dropped them. Another area has you climb a tower in order to push the fat king who is sitting on a piece of trash into a giant dumpster. Another area has you push the fat queen through a Kidney Stone cave in order to use her body to reach a piece of trash. And the last area has you climb spirals on a giant soda can (admittedly, that last area was meant to be a water park filled with soda but the player physics didn't allow that to happen). In short, I wanted the player to be invested in the map and find it funny while they are playing it. The last thing I would want is someone to be bored when playing the map.

In the end, the feedback I got for this level was very positive. I was told that it was very fun to play and that people did, in fact, find it funny. Everyone also liked how I designed the platforming to work well with the camera. The camera could only rotate at 45 degree increments so I designed every platforming challenge to work at those increments. For any platforming part of the game, you can always rotate the camera to face a certain direction which makes the platforming look 2D (which makes it a whole lot easier to play). All in all, this was a very fun level to make!