MINI MANIA

ABOUT

Mini mania is the result of a university project set with the intention to emulate working as a small indie studio (in our case a team of 14), we were tasked to build, pitch and market a game ready to ship commercially. The game is a puzzle game inspired by portal, making use of a grow/shrink ray to interact with environment elements. Personally, I was involved in making some of the key mechanics along with taking a lead role for the games design and puzzle direction.

My most proud contribution to the game comes in the form of the mirrors, due to the nature of the game, we couldn’t skimp out on the mirrors as we needed to offer accurate reflections of the play space that could update alongside the players actions. I wanted to make these as versatile as possible so that we could have full creative freedom in the puzzle designs.

The final product shows a high quality reflection without decreasing the games performance by any noticeable amount. As for versatility, they can be picked up by the player, moved and rotated whilst still reflecting an accurate image.

After feedback from the game’s external Alpha test, it was clear that the team needed to rethink how we approached the design and layout of our puzzles. This illustrated to me the importance of external testing in the development process and I led the group, making the foundation for how the we would approach the making of future levels.

The game space became an interesting and engaging experience for players, displaying a stable learning curve whilst still testing the players knowledge of mechanics alongside logical thinking.

This led to some nice engagement at external playtest events, forming crowds of people eager to see what our game had to show