Save your friends from brats and bimbos. Collect health from cream buns, cigarettes and cheap beer!
Pandaland
I, Svante Danielsson (concept, code, graphics) and Nils Vaernö (sound effects and music) created the game Pandaland. A computer game about a indiepop girl in Södermalm, Stockholm. As Amanda Panda, your task is to save your friends from brats and bimbos. Collect health from cream buns, cigarettes and cheap beer! I did concept development (with Svante), interaction design, level design and the website.
Fun and challanging
Priority number one for the level design was of course Fun, at no point should the game feel boring. One of the challanges here is to as far as possible avoid situations where the player might feel stupid. The levels should become more and more challanging as the game progresses, but situations that might make the player feel it's not the challange and difficuly as much as own stupidity that causes the character to die has to be avoided.
From playtesting endlessly, two things stood out and were kept in mind to aviod the situations mentioned above. (1) While designing the levels, special attention was paid to design challanges that seem to and feel more difficult than they infact are. In the final result, such are some jumps that seem hard but in fact are just as far as the character can jump and thus are pretty easy for the player to execute. (2) Since this is a platform game, natural "speedbumps" or stops were placed at some edges to make sure the player wouldn't just fall to her death. These speedbumps where also placed in front of some enemy encounters where the previous section would've made her run at high speeds.
Pepp!