Ruins & Switch
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Pitch
In Ruins & Switch you play as Bob the Adventurer in an indie puzzle-platformer. You are armed with a hat, a pickaxe and a mystical power that inverts blocks and voids. Explore 28 levels spread over 4 different worlds, defeat 5 terrifying bosses and your infamous rival, the Baron von Zwitsch, to eventually find the treasures of a forgotten city.
Gameplay Video
Origin
It all started with a Level Design exercise, in my school. We were 4 Game Designers and we had to create a little game and develop a few levels on it. Since we liked the prototype and the concept, we decided to go all the way to make it a complete experience.
Team
Gaétan RISCHE – Programmer​, Boss Designer
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Fabrice ROISNE-HAMELIN –Game Designer, Game Art, Level Designer
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Joffrey DELANGLE-TREFF – Game Designer, Level Designer
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Myself, Matthieu RIBOULOT – Game Designer, Level Designer
What I did
The Game Design was done collegially between the 4 of us, it's hard to determine exactly who did what in this case.
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For the Level Design part, it’s clearer, however. Our game was made with Game Maker Studio, so we used the scene editor. I built 11 Levels of the game including all the levels of the third world, “Unlit Cave”. This represents about 40% of the game and 2 hours of gameplay.
This world is characterized by restricted visibility, interactions with light sources and a special enemy, which had to be tutored and then highlighted in the Level Design.
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When I made the level, even if our mechanics already ensured lots of freedom for the player, I needed to make sure to have one readable critical path. I also needed to think about how to hide the 3 gold coins that are our secondary objectives.
We had to do Rational Level Design to make sure we understood the interactions between the mechanics of the player and his environment.
In the end, I was also responsible for the difficulty progression, in particular, to balance the bosses and the 4th world.
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I also did a lot of QA to make sure that the final product matched our ambitions.
Post-Mortem
Not being a fan of platformers, at first sight, Ruins & Switch was a project that opened my eyes to the fact that I don't want to limit myself to the games I usually play (typically strategy or visual novel games) in a professional setting. The development was carried out with very few incidents and with a highly motivated team.
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I find the result very interesting in terms of mechanics and I'm happy with the levels I was able to create. There's a retro atmosphere in Ruins & Switch that I particularly like.
Despite the fact that this game has remained relatively anonymous, we've had very good feedback from players.
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