Tubular!

Role: Game Designer & Animator
Team Size: Eight
Duties: Concept Creation, Game Design, Quality Assurance, Rigging and Animation
Status: Released in 2010 – Download

TUBULAR! is a school project which was developed over the course of a couple weeks, and was intended to be a simple, achievable project with a major focus on gameplay and uniqueness.

As the sole designer on the project, I came up with the initial concept, and from there the programmers began making a prototype. With each iteration, I tested, played and commented, making sure that even the most basic of gameplay mechanics were fun, or at least had clear potential to become fun.

This was an important step, as there were a handful of design choices that were initially made, and only upon playing the early gameplay iterations was I able to conclude that the decisions were not as good as I had imagined. I went back to the drawing board, came up with a number of alternatives, and then found which one would be the best to pursue.

I also rigged both the player ship and the surrounding planets, skinned them and animated everything. A number of different rigging solutions had to be experimented with to see what the engine was able to process, as well as making sure the rig could support cartoony squashing and stretching animations to have the ship move in a cartoony style to fit with the rest of the game.

You can download the design document if you are curious, and if you want to play TUBULAR! for yourself you can download the game.