Keep Me Posted
Play as Postman Mouse, friend of ordinary and Eldritch alike in this top down action adventure RPG.
Major Contributions:
I was responsible for most of the design on this project and most of the implementation.
Made paper prototypes, design documents, maps, level diagrams, greyboxes in-engine, built the environment, designed combat experience, balanced the player avatar, balanced all enemies, and drafted and iterated on final boss fight.
Integrated art assets including 3D models, 2D and 3D animations, and UI elements.
General systems integration, making sure all necessary systems supported the combat and narrative experience and were correctly tuned for optimal player experience.
More about the project:
The main question behind this project was: can six of us, working full time in the woods for eight weeks, make a game from scratch? The short answer is yes*.
The core concept for this game was "delightful cosmic horror". We designed Keep Me Posted to be a delightful experience, accessible to casual players who just want to gallivant around a forest as a cute little mailman. The character design, narrative design, audio design, environment design, and gameplay design were all approached with the goal of having the player feel delighted by existing in this world. The tight time constraint on this project meant rapid iteration on ideas and design.
At the end of our eight weeks, we decided to run a small Kickstarter campaign, which added some additional work to the project we tackled part-time over the next couple of months. We successfully Kickstarted and published the game end of 2022.
*One of the major lessons I learned working on this project was that if you perfectly scope eight weeks to create one game, you can make one game in eight weeks. We had all just finished our sophomore year of college, and learned through this project that a final game is not the first version of the game you make. While we were able to go through some major iterations and pivots during the eight weeks of working full-time, this did not allow for a full iteration of an eight-week game. A piece of advice I wish I had received before this project is, "You'll always know the game you're making better after you've made it the first time." I now try operate with a, "Scope your games to require no more than 50% of the time you have to make it" mentality when possible, so that my team and I have as much time to make the better version of our game as we had when making it the first time.
Having debriefed with my friends, we all wished we had time to look at what we made, dissect it to find the best parts of it, then spend some time honing it to become as effective as possible. Games are in fact an iterative art, and there's nothing like not having the time to iterate that will teach you the importance of that.
World and Environment Walkthrough
Bossfight Showcase
