Thursday, November 26, 2015

Various work examples of casual social network games


 Most of my online social platform game design experience comes from building levels (and co-designing new features) for Cute vs. Evil, a neat hybrid game with both swipe-3 elements and bubble-shooter elements, combined into one.

Limited spaces and visibility for multiple target platforms, including older phones, made some interesting but fun level design challenges. I am pretty happy with the results, so far :-)



To try out one of my levels, go play on Facebook
or click HERE (maybe in new browser session).
Smoothie Swipe and Baby Blocks are two differente entities from Hapti.co. The first is a true swipe 3-casual game while the other is a destroy-similar-blocks-to-make-a-path puzzle.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Into The Fire - tablet game


currently Work In Progress: My Into The Fire tablet game. Fast, casual game where you move a tiny but brave firefighter through a burning complex (each level is a new floor), fighting fire, navigating obstacles, avoiding hazards and rescueing trapped civilians. It all plays pretty fast and you have to prioritize what to do and where to go, in order to score the most points without having the building collapse on you!

GameGlobe level design

I did a huge amount of levels of all sorts for GameGlobe, the build-share-play title I worked on for many years at IO Interactive and Hapti.co. Here are just a few example screen shots:

 This is a challenge where the player must recognize the pattern of invisible floors phasing in and out of visibility, in order to cross them safely. Trick is, once they are invisible, players will also fall through them, plunging to their death!
The level was used in the main campaign of the pirate treasure hunting adventure game.


This pinball inspired puzzle is quite different as the player must activate floor switches to turn temple elements in order to lead a permanent flow of point balls through the maze above and down to his/her own position.


 Here I did a classic murder mystery adventure, set in an old mansion, of course :-) Quite fun as I had to add character dialogue and set up their behaviour so that they did not attack you on sight - at this point we had no civilians to control in the game, so all characters were present to fight the player character on sight.

My take on a classic battle scene from a beloved sci-fi movie :-) Everything moved and worked as in the movie, but it was all built with pieces from the pirate adventure pack as we had no sci-fi elements at this point. I even added the Imperial Theme as a soundtrack (had to set up the music keys from scratch).
 This time I took the pirate village stuff and made it into a Rubrick Cube like puzzle where you had to turn all parts of the small world into place in order to complete the level (connect the world).
 This was a fun exercise :-) I took various Aztec Temple pieces and put them together and then added effects as well as controllers and triggers. The result: A boss level where you have to fight a huge temple monster!
 There are side-scrollers, top-down shooters, first person shooters... and now also bottom-up shooters :-) I inverted the controls and put the camera below the character who was running around fighting enemies on a frozen lake. Just for fun, I also added the occasional schools of fish that swam between the camera and the character above.


Champions of Midgard prototype and final game board

 Thought I wanted to share some pictures of my hybrid worker placement/dice combat board game, Champions of Midgard. Published by Grey Fox Game who did a very good job in the finishing touches. I am very happy with the result - and so are the reviewers, it appears. This one earned me my second Dice Tower Seal of Excellence award :-)

Prototype version of the game being played. Viking ships on their way into glorious battle!

Game setup, prototype version of CoM

Final board for CoM.



Final, published version of CoM being played.