Brett Evades | Ian Whatmough Design

Brett Evades His Personal Responsibilities

Project Overview

I created this game as a solo project during my first year at Champlain College. I started with the idea of a game in which the player must swap places with enemies in order to solve puzzles, then decided to integrate the theme of “swapping places” throughout the entire game, from the puzzle concepts, to the boss fights, and even in the story.

The Player (the Green Two Legged Sprite) Swaps Places With an Enemy (the Red and Yellow Arrow Sprite)

The game narrative centers on a character who is in debt and attempting to flee it – essentially putting their burden on others, or swapping places with them to gain something. I took a few simple concepts and tried to build upon them throughout the game.

The game was made with GameMaker Studio 2 and uses pixel art I made. The game consists of five chapters with a series of different puzzles and boss fights throughout them, along with voice-acted characters to convey the story. It takes roughly 40 minutes to an hour to play.

Wall/Spike Mechanics

One of the first mechanics encountered in the game is that of red walls, which the enemies can move through but not the player. In this puzzle, a horizontally moving enemy is trapped in a cage of green bushes and cannot escape. It bounces off the edges of the cage but will continuously pass through the red wall in the center, demonstrating to the player that enemies can move through them. The player must deduce that if they swap places with the enemy in the right place, the enemy will move through the walls for them. They can then swap places with the enemy again once it is behind the red walls and use the portal to escape.

2D Top Down Puzzle Game
Late 2021
Game Maker Studio 2
PC
Solo Project
- Developed Themed Storyline and Puzzles
- Implemented All Game Mechanics
- Tested Gameplay

The Player Using an Enemy To Get Past the Red Walls

A similar challenge involves spikes that kill the player, but can be destroyed by enemies. If the player swaps from the correct position while the enemy is moving down, the enemy will destroy the spikes in the path, clearing the way for the player to move through unharmed.

Blue Enemy Mechanic

Another major challenge of the game are the blue enemies that move in random patterns. The player cannot swap with them but can use the other entities to destroy them just like spikes.

The Player Using an Enemy To Get Past the Spikes

Here, the player is confronted with one of these entities. If the two collide, the player will die, but the player can swap with the vertically moving entity at the top and use it to defeat the blue enemy.

First Boss

The idea of swapping with enemies to get them to crash into an obstacle is continued in the first of the game’s boss fights, where the player encounters a massive dragon. The boss continuously moves towards the player, who must swap places with several different red enemies in order to have them crash into the dragon, lowering the boss's health until it is defeated.

The Player Taking Out a Blue Enemy With a Red Enemy

Final Boss

For the last challenge of the game, I decided to have the player face their own ability: just as the player can swap places with red enemies, the final boss can swap places with the player. It will do so every three seconds, with a counter above its head showing the time left. The boss moves continuously downward towards a field of spikes that won’t damage it, but will kill the player if the boss swaps with the player while on them.

The player must swap places with the boss to keep it from reaching the spikes before the counter runs out, and must also swap with the boss to position it above green spikes that will damage it. This pattern leads to a constant back and forth game where the player must keep moving and swapping to avoid being killed, but still be skilled enough with their positioning to get the boss to hit the green spikes.

The Player Swapping With a Horizontal Enemy So it Hits the Dragon and Does Damage

The Player Using their Swap Ability to Damage The Final Boss

In the gif above, the boss is the blue sprite. The 2 above its head shows the player they have about two seconds before the boss swaps places with them. The player runs upwards so that the boss will be further from the spikes before they next swap places, then gets into position above the green spikes to damage the boss.

The green spikes disappear after the boss hits them, so the player must use all green spikes in the room to lower the boss’s health to 0 and beat the game. The boss collides with one of the green spikes at the beginning of the fight automatically to show that they will damage it.