FLIP FLOP
2D Platforming Puzzle Game
about
Flip Flop was a Global Game Jam entry developed under 72 hours. It's a 2D puzzle platforming game in which a dying fish mush reach a fish hook by teleporting left and right, in and out to reach the objective.
my responsibilities
I'm the engineer and designer of this project.
My main responsibilities were:
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Gameplay Design
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Level Design
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Programming
Responsibility: Brainstorm
The theme of Global Game Jam was "Duality". We immediately thought of magnets, magnetic forces. like an electric motor, even though two magnets are separated, they both have effects on the coil in the middle.
Stage 1 Keywords: two characters with opposite traits, back and forth, attraction
Responsibility: ideation
We started diagraming possible mini gameplays. The player controls two characters, one carries a positive charge, one carries a negative charge. Just like magnets, each character could attract or repel objects with same or different charges.
In this example, the red character could attract the blue half of the spinning rod and repel the red half of the spinning rod, and vice versa for the blue character.
Stage 2 Keywords: two characters with opposite charges, manipulating environment, attraction and repulsion.
One other idea we had was that each character could help manipulating and maneuvering environments on the other half of the space
Responsibility: Gameplay
"Primary Mechanics"
We drew inspiration from Portals the game, where player could utilize portals to reach seemingly "unreachable" places with the portal gun, and once they reach that place, new opportunities are presented to the player. Our fish could teleport itself horizontally only, and it could teleport to the first surface position the horizontal raycast could hit. Our idea is that being at point A could probably only lead you to point B, yet once you are at point B, more possible points of destination opens up to you.
The player will be teleporting left and right, inside and out.
Keywords: Point to point teleport, moving back and forth
Responsibility: Level Design idea
We went back to reconsidering the meaning of "Duality", and quickly realized that not only we could move left and right in a space, but also in and out. In a nutshell, two spaces are aligned right next to each other(left and right), and two additional layers are stacked on top of each other(in and out).
Stage 3 Keywords: Left and Right, In and Out, layers
Responsibility: Level Design process
We then started sketching out possible flows of our levels, from simple flows to complex flows. We decided to have no inside layers in the first few levels, and introduce the mechanics of teleporting in and out in later levels. We noticed that the complexity of our game comes from how much overlap the flow of the level has. So we slowly added more and more overlapping flows as the game progresses
Keywords: more overlap = more difficult
Once we have sketched up some flows, we started sketching and diagraming actual levels for testing. Some of the levels didn't work at all, and some of the levels required multiple iterations after testing.
team
Design: Robert Li
Engineering: Robert Li
Art: Ink Sun
Audio: Tilkey Yang