navi (2011)

This was my first game Jam that i ever attended! Being such a newbie designer, the project was my first taste in creating a video game with a small team of people. Being the main designer on the team we initially crafted a dog fighting game, however due to time constraints we decided to cut half way through production and focus on a smaller concept using as many assets as we could from the previous one, with the limited time we had. As a result we created NAVI.

A flight simulator game that will take the player into a fun, quick adventure by flying through diverse themed pipelines that contain multiple obstacles which the player needs to dodge. The gameplay is rather simple, fly though themed pipes (corridors) and avoid all incoming obstacles or collect as many green rings on the way to boost your speed until you reach the end, don't take too much damage! The player has the option to use the virtual analogue or to use the accelerometer (actual movement of the device to change the movement of the avatar).

Platform: IOS

Genre: Flight simulator

Role: Game Design & Level Design

Team: Jonathan Sant (programming & sound) Sean Savona (Designer, UI & 3D modelling), Mathew Mangion (Programming), Daryl Zammit (Design & UI) and Boban Hailemariam (Programmer) 

Development Time: 4 weeks

level generation

Each level contains pipes, each pipe can be broken down into segments. 9 segments were built with the same start and end position. Therefore all we needed to do was connect them. This made the level construction ridiculously easy and fast. Each level would be different each time you played it because we would set the system to randomly pick segments. I was tasked to build the segments using 3DS max and populate them with obstacles and integrate them with Unity 3D along with different themes to decorate them with.

controls

We added two control schemes that would allow players to chose their preference; accelerometer and touch input. Being a mobile device game, spending time on the accelerometer functionality was very important in creating a better experience. However, we discovered that not all players enjoy this control scheme and preferred a touch input, therefore we created it just in case to give player choice.

hud

I wanted the player to not get distracted and look at the lower/upper part of the screen to see the amount of hit points they had. Therefore, I made the hit points and boot meter surround the player avatar (ship) so that they can concentrate on what is up ahead.