Weird Bird

Weird bird is a 3D platformer where you ride around the an icy environment as a penguin. The game is a sandbox open world game where you slide around at high speed, and complete various activities.

For this project I worked as the Lead game designer, producer, QA tester, Level designer, and System developper.

The game was made for my final years at the CNAM-ENJMIN video game school. We had to make a sandbox open world with several added constraints, such as developping analytic tools and 3D character rigging and animation.

In the end, we aimed towards making the controller as fun as possible to play, then figuring out most activites afterwards. The controller was tricky to design because we wanted a fast and smooth sliding movement, but the map had to be pretty small, while having the environment designed for sliding. I did multiple passes on how would the environment be like and agenced so moving around the objectives felt good. The first map was way bigger than the final one, but felt way to flat, with some areas having a lot of empty and dull space. We tried to figure out a way to design a multi leveled environment that would use the penguin ability to propel itself in the air using ramps easier, and that added a challenging but rewarding way to travel across the world.

The game was also designed with the thought that the people that would play and test it were not skilled at playing video games. The penguin walking speed is very slow, and there was a need to showcase the sliding mechanic in a way that would give the players an incentive to use it right at the start of the game. That lead to design a tutorial in a separate area, which had obstacles where you need to used this mechanic, in an attempt to force the player to learn it.