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Emille has been approved for distribution on the iTunes App Store! It’s available to download for free starting today!

The Mac version of Emille can be downloaded here.

When approaching level design for Slippery Seal there were a few things I had to consider. Movement in Slippery Seal can either be swimming through water, jumping in the air, or sliding on land. I had to find a way to seamlessly and logically work these together. I used a variety of slopes on most of the levels leading to some kind of aerial challenge. Most levels are based off of one big challenge. I’ve placed an image of Hope Island below, the challenge for this level is the loop of clams on the top right corner of the screen. Players have to gain enough speed on the ramp (or using a power-up) to jump through the air and successfully loop up and around the ramp to gather the semi-circle cluster of clams. The main goal in Slippery Seal is to eat a certain amount of clams per level – placing these clams was the most difficult task for me. The first level only had 100 clams to place, with a 60 target goal for players; the very last level had 360 clams, with a 240 target. I didn’t want collecting clams to become repetitive or too tedious, I tried my best to think of nice shapes that would be easy to collect with Slippery’s movement.

Here’s Hope Island, one of my favorite levels that I designed. On the right is my initial SVG, made in InkScape, and on the left is what it looked like after we layered graphics.

My design process was to first sketch out each level on paper, deciding on the basic layout, size, and orientation. Since each level is based on a real-life location, I researched them online to see if there were any distinct geographical features I could try to re-create. After I had the design properly laid out, I re-created it again using Inkscape iterating as needed. It’s interesting how something can look amazing on a piece of paper, but look a disaster once on a computer. From there, I played the level on my phone to make sure it was easy to navigate. The last thing was the placing of clams, enemies, and power-ups according to each level’s specifications.

I hope the levels turned out easy to navigate and most of all fun for players. If you have any feedback after playing through Slippery Seal, let me know!

I can’t seem to embed Ustream videos to my blog, so I’ll just have to post a link. Here’s a video excerpt of an interview Scott Hernandez (Art Director) and I did with NowLoadingTV talking about Emille and the whole “What Would Molydeux?” Game Jam experience! The full version of the interview will be online soon!

Check it out!

We’re working on getting Emille approved for distribution in the iTunes App Store for iPads; in the meantime here are some screenshots of the project! Ideally, we would like to release it for Android tablets and Mac computers as well. I am so excited we were able to have a complete game at the end of 48 hours! It was a long process and I learned a lot. Thankfully, I had such an amazing group of people to work with. I hope we can continue to work on Emille making it better and add in the ideas we couldn’t complete during our 48 hours. The storyline we created for Emille is pretty incredible and we have more complex puzzles planned out. We’ll see where the road takes us. I will post more about the entire MolyJam weekend in another post!

All the music in Emille was composed by Sean Ursani and can be listened to or purchased on bandcamp.

Emille’s official website is www.EmileGame.com.

If you haven’t already heard, there is currently a global Video Game Jam happening called Molyjam! The challenge is to create a game based off one of Peter Molydeux’s Tweets! Peter Molydeux is a parody account inspired by master game designer Peter Molyneux – Molyneux himself actually attended the jam location in London! There are currently 36 locations around the world participating in this event! It’s incredible! This is my first game jam, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Thankfully, I am working with a team of great and inspiring people who just want to make the best game in 48 hours. Each of us has a different background and skillset that compliment each other, from Web Designers, to experienced Game Designers, Artists, to a Composer – I feel incredibly lucky! We’re going to put up a website for the team and our game by the end of Sunday (tomorrow). The game jam officially ends at 7:00pm (local time).

Our game is titled Emille. The game was developed using a combination of the following tweets.

• FPS War game, you control the teddy bear of a child who has just escaped a death camp. Help them find their mother using your wits
• Do you know what I’m fed up with? Numbers in games.
• What if ghosts had dreams?
• Let me tell you that gaming isn’t about winning, gaming is about believing. What if games rewarded you for believing rather than winning?
• We need to stop making games that say ‘I’m a videogame’ and start making games that say ‘What am I?’
• The best game environments tell a story. What if you could play out that story while also playing the core game? At the same time.
• Game where you must hold onto your mother’s hand. Let go for more than X seconds and it’s game over.
• We’ve had emotional game endings but have we ever had an emotional title screen?
• Love in gaming is always emotion. What if love in a game was a physical enemy? Does that very notion not blow your mind like it does mine?
• Have you noticed that ALL games have text? Text in games is just lazy game design when you think about it.

All I can show you now is the protagonist herself, Emille. Emille is optimized for all iPad devices. It will be on the iTunes App Store very soon!