This was a project for Jesse Schell's Game Design class at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, which I took as part of my Game Design minor. The assignment was to make any game in about a month, and it would be ranked on several criteria including how fun it was. Initially, I wanted to make a game about an odd two-legged creature where you controlled each of his legs separately using a controller's two joysticks. He could flip over to walk, and climb walls or ceilings with his suction cup feet. I prototyped this idea in Unity and found that it was extremely slow and tedious to play. I wanted to make my game as fun as possible, so I decided to try to go in the opposite direction, and create a movement scheme where small inputs would have big results on the character’s movement. I came up with a couple ideas based on that, and the one that seemed the most promising was rolling and jumping. I built a simple prototype and played around with it for a bit. Bouncing around was very fun and it felt like a good toy, so I was happy with it and decided to build it into a full game.
I was the only developer on this game. I did the design and programming, and selected & edited the art and music. Since I wanted to finish by the deadline, I had to find ways to fill the gaps in my skillset with freely available resources. In past solo projects I have had trouble finding enough art and music to fit the style I wanted, so for Rolly Olly, I picked the art first and then designed the rest of the game around that. One artist, Kenney, has a lot of free art in a cartoony style I wanted, so I downloaded several of his packs. When coming up with level themes and mechanics, I looked at these for inspiration and designed the game around them so that I wouldn't be stuck struggling to find art that fit my ideas. For example, the second world is industrial-themed because Kenney has an entire pack of industrial platformer assets. This approach also helped me focus my design ideas and keep them in scope.
I put in a lot of effort to make the game as polished as possible. Visually, I rounded off all the corners on the levels, added decorative scenery, put in a bunch of particle effects, and added a bouncy animation to the player character. This animation was very well received by players, and they enjoyed the bouncy-seeming squash and stretch effect. I also implemented sound effects and music, which in past projects I have tended to neglect. Gameplay-wise, I made a pause menu, credits, and added gamepad support for everything. Most players might not see all these details but I think it was at the very least a good exercise in creating a solid finished project while still under a deadline, and the audiovisual details turned out to be a big factor in the game feeling good to play.
