Penguizard

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Project Details

Project Date: November – December 2024
Release Status: Available
Platforms: Itch
Tools Used: Unity, Affinity

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Project Summary

Penguizard was my final project for my Intermediate Game Design class in Fall of 2024. The guidelines for the project were very open ended, being to simply create something of quality equal to or greater than a previous project we had worked on. So, I decided to take a lot of the successes of Mousefire, and apply those to a 2D platformer. Earlier in the semester we did have a 2D platformer project, but I was overall not super excited by my final result. Penguizard was my idea of “redemption” for that style of game.

In past projects, the values of play testing really just involved the smoothness of controls, and the relief of mechanical pain points (such as, enemy hitboxes being too big). With Penguizard I had to address a new problem — clarity. With the game being a puzzle platformer, I found sometimes the mechanics were not entirely clear. One simple solution was adding the ability to open the spellbook to read how the penguin’s magic worked. But, my most successful response to frustration caused by clarity, was by including a subtle clue of how to pass a puzzle.

At this point in the game, to proceed you must think through how to both freeze the platform so you can jump on it, while simultaneously passing the wall that the freeze spell causes to form. A lot of people had trouble figuring out the solution. So, I decided to add hieroglyphs in the background of this segment of the game that would outline the steps to take to pass the wall.

To play the Penguizard yourself, you can download it for free on Itch.