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Muscles & Rockets
Muscles & Rockets is a 2.5D action platformer where you use rocket launch to move yourself and fight
I created Muscles & Rockets in collaboration with 4 other game designers as the last big project of my first year at Isart.
It is the first interdisciplinary game project I made.
We, the game designers, worked in collaboration with game programmers and a music and sound designer.
Game design
For the game design of Muscles & Rockets, the biggest challenge was figuring out how to make the counterintuitive rocket launcher concept accessible to an audience not necessarily familiar with genres like Team Fortress. We initially thought of starting with a backtracking game where you infiltrate a bank and then escape to the exit after the heist, but we decided to go with a much simpler platformer. As development progressed, we evaluated our objectives based on our target audience: the pacing and difficulty choices stemmed from this.
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creation of the metrics
The question of player freedom also arose: should they have as many shots as they want? Do the shots damage them? All these questions led us to focus much more on the gameplay feel. Once we had perfectly configured the air control system, we built the level features on top of it.
Level Design
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creation of the metrics
For level design, after establishing the game feel, we focused on designing simple, easy-to-code characteristics that offered a wide range of possible situations for the player. After producing many of these, we realized that platforming was much more fun than combat. Therefore, we agreed that enemies would be there to provide support and challenge the player, but wouldn't be essential.
After conceptualizing many situations, we divided them up according to skill levels to maintain a balanced and progressively increasing difficulty curve. I then took a few situations and paced them to avoid overstimulating the player.
My level aimed to introduce timed platforms that collapse if you stay on them too long. So I designed a level in the air to create the right atmosphere, and I considered all the potential of this feature: it can be used to stall, to create a surprise effect, to maintain pressure, or even to make the player run like in Indiana Jones. The goal was to choreograph each situation, ensuring that every movement towards an unknown platform was visually obvious.
conception of a few situations
pacing of the selected situations
Trailer
For the trailer, I was responsible for pacing it according to the main theme used in the trailer. We added cinematic shots to give it a bit of flair and explain the story, and I then emphasized the unique selling point to entice people to try the game through simple but dynamic cuts.
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