Sebastian Madsen

Summary

Chameleon is a platformer with a casual stealth-gimmick. You play as a Chameleon-thief, with a quest to steal the royal treasure. In the game you can’t attack enemies head-on, without a power-up with limited use. Instead you had to navigate behind enemies to take them down.

The game’s artstyle and theme was heavily influenced by Disney’s Robin Hood. We decided very quickly that we wanted the main character to be a chameleon, because they have unique quirks that can be fun to use in a game.

Specifications

• Platformer

• Created in 8 weeks half-time

My Contributions

• Level Design

• Game Design

• Propping

• Playtesting

Design Philosophy

Deciding what kind of game we wanted to make wasn’t very easy. Half of the group wanted fast-paced platformer, and the other half wanted a stealth-game. To not waste time, we settled on combining the two. But there was one big problem with that; what we decided to make doesn’t really exist as a whole game. With luck we found one game that had exactly what we wanted – Rayman Legends.

Rayman Legends is a very smooth and fast paced game, but there is a chapter with a stealth-gimmick.

We spent many hours looking at that game to create a nice flow, with quick and slow sections. That game’s pacing was exactly what the platformer-half of our group wanted, and the fact that they also had a stealth-chapter was a match made in heaven.

We also took inspiration from the Rayman-series when we looked at different abilities. Chameleon could swing from specific swing-points and walljump. We also had fireflies in the level that allowed Chameleon to shoot three fireballs. This was the only other way to defeat enemies, aside from backstabbing.

Working as a team

In this project we worked with Hussein Taher’s editor, which I also worked on in the previous project, Dragon Rage. When the pre-production was done, the workflow went smoothly. The idea was that Level Design would whitebox the levels, and after that the graphical artists would prop the environment.

Because of overscoping, we and the graphical artists worked togheter with the prop:ing. When that many people did the same thing, we really had to be open with who did what and when, to avoid people overwriting other people’s work. Mistakes happened, but as a whole our communication within the team worked really well.

Closing Thoughts

I think we did what we could with the time and idea we had. If I could do it again, I would lean more heavily in one of the two directions. Making a game that everyone was happy with, doesn’t really work.

I think it was a mistake to just settle on a combination of two ideas, and that we should’ve discussed what we wanted to do more.