Project iDev
(iiii Design)
Description
iDev is a student-pitched ETC Project that was executed during my Fall 2009 semester and focused on creating innovative games for the iPhone. Our project focused on four majors goals: 1. experimental game deisgn, 2. creating full iPhone games, 3. App Store availability, and 4. the creation of our company, iiii (4i) Design. The team is made of four game designers, each of us filling in a key role in a game development team. My official role was as an artist & game designer, but we were all able to overlap in to each other's roles as well.
We spent the 1st quarter of our semester creating individual prototypes, each of us learning the iPhone environment and the Objective C coding language. The remainder of the semester was spent creating Mismos and Handshake, our two games we chose to further develop. More can be found at iiiidesign.com
Primary Role
Game Designer and Artist.
Personal Design Contribution
Mismos, the first game we worked on, was based on the prototype, Reflection. I created the core mechanic during the first week of prototyping and Camilo, our programmer, later polished it in to a platform puzzle. We decided to turn Reflection in to Mismos because of the potential for interpretive meaning and exapansion the core gameplay provided.
In the core mechanic, you tilt the iPhone left and right to roll the two avatars, which are mirrored opposite images of each other, along their mirrored paths. When you flick your finger across the screen, the topmost avatar will jump. In order to have the same affect on the bottom avatar, you need to flip the iPhone around so that top becomes bottom and bottom becomes top.
The mechanic took the popular tilt-to-move mechanic and gave it an extra twist to create a new form of interaction that was simple and intuitive for a player to understand.
The idea is that by the simple process of changing ones perspective of an environment, we could create new and interesting challenges within a game. Likewise, a change in perspective could tell the same story in a new way.
The Team
Ben Miller (game designer and producer)
Camilo Garcia (game designer and programmer)
Aaron Vanderbeek (game designer, sound designer, and composer)
Theresa Chen (game designer, UI designer, and artist)
