Chewy

Role: Level Designer
Team Size: Nine
Duties: Gameplay Design, Level Design, Level Building and Quality Assurance
Status: Released in 2010 – Download
Awards: Best Design Award at the Independent Propeller Awards, Diamond Award at the Festival of Games, Superhero: Best Game of the Year at Brave New Game

CHEWY is a school project that was, at first, developed as a prototype by a small team over the course of a couple weeks. Since the prototype was relatively enjoyable, myself and another designer were recruited to the project to completely redesign the game and create three new levels for submission to the Independent Games Festival for 2011.

During production I learned to use our custom level editor, which required me to draw collision lines and place textures in different layers to build the levels from the ground up. The two levels I was tasked with went through many iterations over the course of the two months I worked on the project, and I thoroughly playtested them to assure a high level of quality and fun.

I sketched out rough designs for the levels on paper, and scanned them in for use in photoshop. I then made a clean level layout on a grid similar to the grid in our editor, and used the photoshop image as a template to build the blockout from. This made level creation quick and easy to iterate, and I only moved on to the decoration phase once the blockout was fun and fine-tuned.

Apart from the levels themselves, I designed new features such as the bubble mechanic and player feedback, and oversaw their implementation.