Pandemic
Summary
Pandemic is a 2D action platformer with a unique Hookstaff movement mechanic and frame by frame animated characters taking place in an Italian coastal city that
has been hit by a all consuming plague. The main focus of the game is exploration and traversal of huge and interconnected levels, with combat giving some variety to the
journey.
The game has been originally created for the fourth semester Project Phase at the MD.H Munich using Unity, and has been Improved upon since then by various Bug Fixes, more polished levels and some additional environmental assets.
Team Members:
Game & Level Design / Lead - Daniel Probst
Art Lead / Character - Katharina Franz
Programming Lead - Frederic Fulghum
Programming - Philipp Glas
Level Design - Yannick Arndt
Tech Art - Alex Kuth
Enemy Art & Environment - Verena Geilfus
Environment Art - Florian Mazreku
Environment Art - Thora Waldmann
Environment Art - Michelle Sonntag
Environment Art - Klara Kisa Porseng
Personal Role
My Personal Involvement in this Project was primarily as a Producer, Game & Level Designer,
with the picture above giving a good feeling for what I spend most of my time doing.
As a Producer this was the biggest team I had worked in so far at the time and organizing it proved to be quite a challenge. I had to try several different approaches to find a
way to structure the project throughout its development, and learned much trough each of these iterations. My main takeaway between all of them has been that enforcing the task system is as
important if not more than the system used itself.
As a Game Designer my main Task was to build up the game from an idea to a fleshed out Game Design that we would follow throughout the project phase. The challenge hereby was to
create a game concept before the project phase, even though multiple other school assignments still weight heavily on my spendable time and to refine it throughout development without loosing to
much work trough changing plans or failing concepts.
Design work was done partially in collaboration with Yannick Arndt and quite often also included discussions with our two coders Philipp Glas and
Frederic Fulghum.
Additionally we also held multiple play tests that needed to be prepared, supervised and afterwards the results had to be analyzed to see how the game was working out and if things needed to
change, or if the course could be kept.
Pandemic - Play Tests and Results
As a Level Designer I designed the level and overarching map concepts together with Yannick Arndt, gave feedback to his greybox blockouts and filled in all the Art assets and much of the game logic later on. While doing so, I also spend some of my time modifying and improving the levels as I went.
Additionally, as it proved to be more complicated than at first expected, I spend considerable Time to create a Tileset used for most of the ground and walls in the game and learned quite a bit about Unitys features while doing so.
