Joel Shuart

Chaos Manor is a board game about escaping from a haunted manor. 2-4 Players compete to earn keys and find the exit, first one out is the winner. Every round the manor itself twists, contorts, and changes around them. They can't trust the paths they take will stay the same as they wander the halls but still they can forge new ones in order to find their way out. Players would be able to discover, break, move, and rotate roo tiles in order to make paths through the maze-like manor. Searching rooms to find items to help them on their journey. However, at the start of each players turn the Manor itself fights back, changing on its own.

This project was just to ease my love of boardgames, it was a fun personal project that let me do design work and some arts and crafts (initially). It grew from there and I ended up doing multiple playtests, 3 physical iterations, and 3 digital iterations until I alnded on my 'final' (for now) version. All fo these iterations were mixed betwene each other, going from cardboard v1 to cardboard v2 to digital for a few iterations, before getting the last version printed from gamecrafter.

Digital iterations were done using the game Tabletop Simulator, as it provided a ncie toolset for quickly importing and ease of tweaking gam components. At this point in time I had done a few iterations already and had resolved some early flow issues and the tuning was about deck balance (abilities and frequency of cards), as well as exploring friction points players had. FOr instance, while the items provided in the search mechanic were very powerful, getting them was not entirely reliable. So I modified rules surrounding how players could interact with the world, and added a "blockade" of sorts to cut off paths. Witht his players could make plans towards their goal, or defeinding against other players, without needing any cards todo it. The cards still lent players the majority fo power and options but there was always another avenue available to them.

Designing the variety of items was the most fun. Every item was powerful but situational for the most part, and the abundance meant players were not instant winners becuase they had a card- so did everyone else. They gave some dynamics to encounters between players that egged on competition. Things like being able to steal a card and anothe rplayer being able to block it. Everyone had buitl aplan for themselves, and when it was dashed by someones elses planning things were tense but exciting and fun. Even when things went awry you could try to recover. As the name suggests, the manor moving on its own added a dash of Chaos. It made things not go to plan, or created opportunities players themselves didnt expect. These reveals kept things lively up untilt he last minutes of the game.

The original purpose for this project was just to have this kind of game without 30 million ads. I love the gameplay style, its simple, straightforward, and great for short bursts of play. However, I couldnt stand every variant of the game having ads every 30 seconds, so I figured id just build my own. It was a fun endeavor! Goals are straight forward, maker a simple and fun game where you had to toss knives into a block without hitting en existing knife.

The main mechanic was simple, make the knife move forward, with some hitbox detection for existing knives and detection for the log. With that it was a matter of a fail state for hitting an already embeded knives with some added bounce flair and sfx. As knives and thrown and embeded the log progresses through different hit states before it breaks. Win state was if all knives were embeded, tied into a nice but snappy "complete" screen.

To add depth each level needed to scale (4 rounds) and get more difficult overall. So as you get further in there are a few varibles that increase and randomize. How fast the log spins, its pattern of spin, how many knives you need to toss in, and how many knives are already embeded. The already embeded knives were trickert han expected, because they had to be spread nicely and nto always bet clustered. At the same time I didn't want thema lways evenlys prea,d its too predictable, so I buitl out a system that gave the range from each other and variance. All the while balancing total knife numbers and placements so players could actually still complete every level.

Just throwing knives can still be a bit mindless, even when it gets intense when space is tight and you have mutiple knives left. So I added a goal, something to strive for. With a lightweight highscore system players could trakc their best and have something to achieve and grade their own skill progressing.

This game also acted as an exercise in publishing games to the google play store. I didn't know the process, and figured what better way than put a gameup. So I did.

"A competitive, pirate based, platformer-racer."

Players alternate between Pirate and Parrot every 30 seconds. As the pirate the players goal is to avoclass traps, and items dropped on them by the opposing player as they platform through the course and try to reach the Treasure first. As the parrot, players attempt to slow down the other player by activating traps on the map and dropping utility items like bear traps and heat seeking coconuts.

My work on this project was in a few different points. Firstly, Level design and world building. I designed a level for the game that featured 2 core paths that would increasingly go upward and cross cross. ON top of that there were minor paths here and there to create shortcuts for the bold, or to avoid the hindered paths ahead. (Hindered by the actions of the other player). While this level was not fleshed out by the end of our available time, I did also do all the worldbuilding of the level that was finalized. I used the various props we had to change the lanes of platforms into a more vivid game world. I am a firm believer that the minor details of something help bring out the best in it- and I feel these details brought out the life in the game world.

Secondly, I worked on the UI, specifically the HUD and minor functionality tweaks for the Pause menu. The HUD has a few key features, which are all reiterated in another way in order to reinforce the same information more naturally, and/or expand upon it. These parts are the distance to goal tracker, active trap indicator, and timer for next role switch. Players need to know where the other players racer is at a given time in order to put traps near them, and generally keep track of who is in the lead of how much distance is between them. For this reason the distance to goal tracker exists, it shows the players location on a scale of a point from start to finish. This is reinforced by a glowing beam a players parrot can call forth to get that same information in the actual levels space; this expands on the distance bar on the HUD because it gives the 3D location not just distance traveled between start and end in a 2D fashion. Next, the active trap indicator shows which trap a players parrot has enabled (ie Bear Trap, Lantern, or Coconut), a simple icon shows which one is active and a radial overlay shows the cooldown time until a player can sue their ability again. This is reiterated underneath the parrot itself with the physical model that will be dropped. Finally, the phase timer is shown in the exact middle of the screen, it allows players know how much time they have to make a daring play for a further platform or set a trap for the other player. Whats really important for that is the few seconds leading up to the switch, so on the HUD bar itself during the last 5 seconds the timer goes red to pronounce this. Players had an issue with the shock of the phase change, even with the timer. To resolve this I created a semi-transparent overlay for the players screens that also showed the last 5 second countdown in a large font. Something very noticable. This seemed to work wonderfully, as players no longer were shocked by the change but expected it, and supported the tension of those last few moments in a phase.

"You can't see them, but they can see you."

Silver Echo is a game made within 48 hours for Global Game Jam 2017. The theme was waves. For our game we created a stealth game where you cannot see the enemies patroling the level, unless they are caught by an echo pulse from the player. Players must avoid the vision cones of the enemies whilst gathering keycards to exit the level. The game seemed to achieve a level of intensity that players really enjoyed; players would be on their toes the entire time and had their heart racing when they attempted to run from someone who noticed them.