This proyect was inspired by TF2 jump maps, aiming to strip rocket jumping down to its fundamentals and make kinesthetic mechanics more accessible whilst keeping them interesting and rewarding.

This was done by focusing more on the expressiveness and creativity inherent to rocket jumping, and less on precise twitch controls. That design principle resulted in an open-ended puzzle approach, instead of a more linear obstacle course.

Many mechanics are inspired by classic rocket jumping techniques, like pogoing & syncing; and the different rockets are meant to give the player many possible approaches to movement and problem-solving.

I built the blockouts for the levels and designed many of the puzzles within them. The Lab’s Nursery and Bio areas being the ones I’m most proud of.

It was important to contextualize gameplay in a way that made the different rooms interesting and distinct. Most spaces have an in-world purpose beyond their pure gameplay needs.

Puzzles were first designed in abstract as a set of goals and limitations around the player’s positioning, line of sight, and physics objects. For example, using an Atemporal Area with Homing Rockets to separate where you fire from where you aim, turns into the player sneaking their rockets through some service windows.

Scripts were made to be scalable, performant, and easy to use.

I learnt a lot about dev tools, writing scripts that made placing tileable meshes, playing audios from any object, and connecting puzzle-elements much more comfortable & faster.

A lot of care went into the player movement and explosion interactions, as many other mechanics depended upon them. Here it helped coding highly parameterized scripts that anticipated change and made implementing QA feedback much easier.

Limitations of time and manpower can sometimes mean having to help with what you can.

I ended up modeling a handful of tileable assets to fill the emptier spaces on our levels and polishing the geometry of the level blockouts to reduce the demand for larger assets.

Bringing to life big set pieces like the cloud falling in Sulfur Valley and the fan blowing out in The Lab was very rewarding, because it demanded many different things (separating the meshes, animating them, adding particles, etc.) and made the stages a bit more dynamic.