Last year in my Intro to Game Design class a group of students and myself created a game called Discoman. Discoman is a Japanese RPG style game with a major thematic twist. Instead of the traditional fantasy style of these types of games we went with a 70s disco theme. The game featured a variety of mechanics like real-time combat, health and level generation, 4 directional movement, collectible items, and several puzzles. My group consisted of only designers: Tim Layer, Brian Flaherty, and myself. We used Gamemaker to build this digital prototype and though both our art and programming abilities are limited we actually managed to make a decent game.

We find our hero waking up in a dark alley. After a night out at the club, Discoman ran into a couple goons from the mob who roughed him up and stole his lucky dice. Without his lucky dice, Discoman will lose his funk. You have to help Discoman on his wild journey to infiltrate the mob headquarters and face the boss, Big Tony, to get his lucky dice back.

Your adventure takes you down into the sewers where you have to solve a series of puzzles, dodge lasers, and fight off bands of evil mobster robots. Eventually Discoman sneaks into the mob HQ and takes down all of Big Tony’s goons before finally facing him in one ultimate showdown.

I was responsible for the first level of this game. I introduced the player to basic movement, interacting with objects and other characters in the game, and combat. I then brought the player down into the sewer where they had to complete their first puzzle and traverse through a maze.

The point of this project was to show us designers the importance of level design. It was really interesting to work with other people and figure out how to introduce mechanics to the player and then challenge them on their knowledge of those mechanics with more stressful scenarios and harder puzzles. Working on this project gave me a lot of knowledge that I’m currently building on now in my Level Design 1 class this semester. Hopefully I will be able to share some of the work that I’m doing in that class now because it would be really interesting to see how my levels changed over the past year.

Until next time!

PS – If you want to play Discoman let me know