Design

My Design Philosophy

I would say two main principles permeate my design process and materialize in every experience that I create, those being respecting the player's time, and creating a rich, deep, and lifelike world without sacrificing the gameplay experience.

Respecting the player's time, to me, means giving them control as often as possible. Don't trap them in cutscenes longer than necessary. Don't force them to perform monotonous tasks for no reason (AKA "grinding"). It is a game, after all. It's meant to be fun and engaging.

Creating a game world has always been the most exciting part of the development process for me. Establishing characters, locales, backstory, and plot is an important part of any game. Though, obviously, some games warrant less of that than others. Regardless, gameplay always comes first, so I continually strive to strike a perfect balance between those two aspects.

2D Level Design

My experience with 2D Level Design, both technically and philosophically, spans nearly a decade across multiple mediums, tools, and engines. Below are some samples of my recent work.

"Memory Amalgamation"

From Luigi's Lost Memories

This level is intended to be the culmination of everything that has come before it, a final test for the player that permits their escape from Luigi's consciousness and completion of the adventure. As such, it combines aspects from every single level in the game into one last challenge. Within this level, ever overarching mechanic from all past stages, whether that involves enemies, objects, or something else, makes at least one appearance.

Carryable Warp Puzzle

From Unannounced Project

This entire level, known as Matcha Manor, revolves around using carryable (and throwable) warp pipes to progress through the haunted mansion. The puzzles get progressively difficult as the player progresses, with later sections even introducing two new pipe colors, making puzzles even more complicated.

Map/Overworld Design

I have a considerable amount of experience designing tile-based overworlds and maps in the SMBX2 Engine, RPG Maker, as well as Tiled, a free map-creation tool that I am using to allow for more complicated overworld design in my upcoming project.

Game footage not final. Map is not fully completed.

Unannounced Project

This map uses a new external library that allows for an extremely robust and fully customizable map system in comparison to the default one offered by the SMBX2 engine. The library offers spline-based paths, dynamic map objects, and map events. Thanks to the fact that every library for this engine is inherently open-source, I have been able to make modifications to the code to better fit the needs of my game, such as dynamically modifying the priority of certain objects during runtime, which allows the player to walk under, as well as on top of, the overhang in the sky world. In addition, the script modifications have allowed me to create the fading terrain when the player enters the cave leading to "Romaine Ruins" in the forest area, among many other smaller tweaks that make the world map stand out from others.

Luigi's Lost Memories

The scope of Luigi's Lost Memories changed drastically towards the end of development, which in turn rendered the world map obsolete. However, it is still accessible in-game in a purely cosmetic form as a method of preservation. This map expanded upon the base SMBX2 map system by adding custom player animations based on the tile they are currently touching, additional objects such as the rotating Challenge Houses, and an expansion of the maximum allotted unique tile count on a map for the engine.

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