Summary
Crescent Coast is a 2D puzzle platformer developed in 48 hours using Godot for the 2022 Husky Game Jam. In the game, the player controls a magical land crab that can channel magic powers to move the moon in the sky. By using the moon to control the height of the water, players must guide the crab through puzzles containing rocks, sea urchins, and floating driftwood platforms to safely reach the shore.
Contributions
Six people developed Crescent Coast: three programmers, two 2D artists, and myself as the sole game designer. During development, I was responsible for designing most of the 15 playable levels, their respective puzzles, and the mechanics of the floating platforms and obstacles. Additionally, I monitored my teammates' progress to ensure that their work was consistent with the overall design and direction of the game while answering their questions. For example, someone asked if we should implement moving enemies such as birds or jumping sharks to challenge the player's mechanical skill. I responded that while that could be interesting and fun, it wouldn't improve or add depth to our core Moon water level mechanic, so we should prioritize polishing that mechanic to strengthen our core gameplay loop while minimizing scope creep. During production, I initially designed the levels and their puzzles using the Level Designer Tool Kit, a 2D level editor made by Sébastien Benard, one of the developers that worked on Dead Cells. After creating the initial level layouts, I sent them to the rest of my team for review and implementation into Godot using our final tilemaps.
Production and Challenges
As a team, the most challenging aspect of developing Crescent Coast was communication with my team virtually through Discord. Group discussions were especially challenging since people would often get interrupted. Additionally, it was difficult for us to pick up on each other's emotional states since we couldn't read facial expressions and body language. Despite these difficulties, we created a game that exceeded our expectations for something made in 48 hours while meeting our original goal of designing and implementing at least 15 levels. On a personal level, the most challenging part of the project was maintaining my focus while preserving the quality of my work since I was away from home, working on the game from a hotel, airport, and my brother's apartment. Through constant communication with my team about when I would be unavailable and when I could work and answer their questions, I was able to design levels that were easily implemented into the game without consistent access to a playable build of the game for long periods of time. Overall, I enjoyed working on Crescent Coast since I was able to finish the game while learning a new software and practicing my level design skills.