Opi Opi is a cute 2D platforming adventure were you bounce on top of little bugs and overcome natural obstacles to save the spring season.
2024-2025 | Systems, level, environment & audio designer. Music composer.
TBA (Play the demo now on browser!)
Developed in Unity.
Design Pillars
Movement based on diagonal jumps between nodes in a vertically oriented world, set on the surface of a big tree trunk.
Coordination with a lively ecosystem, with challenges centered around the unique behaviours of surrounding flora and fauna.
Bursting with juice
To improve the game's overall readability, I wrote the requirements for and adjusted various visual effects, like leaning motions to direct your jumps, animation curves when bouncing on enemies, colored highlights for damage, and shakes for enemy attack anticipations.
I also designed and implemented all of the game's sound effects, using Fmod for pitch shifting and spatialization.
Thinking with nodes ->
Nodes are the basic building blocks of Opi's levels, determining where players can move to and from in a sort of loose grid.
Considering how different that is from most other platforming games, while designing the levels, I wrote a guide with best practices to improve layout clarity, structure optional/secret areas, highlight enemy paths, and provide safety nets on early challenges.
Fluid motions on a grid
Pato (game director and artist) designed the core rules of Opi's movement, but there were many questions left for me to answer:
Which control inputs should be used on both gamepad and kb? What happens when you jump into empty space? Do you have any amount of control while falling? How should Opi bounce upon colliding with any kind of wall at any possible angle?
Fool-proof systems
Before working on content for the actual demo, I designed around 30 micro-levels to test the flexibility of our mechanics and categorize the types of challenges we could create effectively.
I wrote all of my conclusions in a document, noting similarities regarding the sets of skills required from a player to overcome specific platforming and enemy configurations.
Pretty sights for bug eyes
I configured all of the game's checkpoints and cameras to control the pacing and clarity of the levels, and designed the environments using the beautiful tileset drawn by Pato, making sure that each area felt unique and guiding players with beautiful landmarks.
I was often able to break the pace a bit with fun "thousandpede" rides.
Going from "why did it do that?" to "wow, this is so cool!"
We wanted to present a fresh idea, but testers often had clashing expectations derived from years of playing more typical platformers.
I designed dynamic tutorial dialogues to introduce our mechanics seamlessly within the game's narrative, along with easy "bottleneck challenges" to make sure players could understand everything perfectly.
Solved Challenges
