2024, puzzle platformer
Itch.io
In Hopbot, you’re a little robot fresh off the assembly line from the robot factory. Unfortunately, you happen to be defective, and you have to escape before they recall you! Your defect? When you try to jump, you… make all the robots around you jump instead? How curious.
This was a group project I did for my fourth-year game development class. The original game was made in around three weeks, and at the end of the semester we were given another two weeks to polish it up and add some new content. We were given the prompt of “wrong affordances”: take a relationship between the user and an object that we typically expect to work a certain way, and flip it on its head. This is what we came up with!
In addition to programming the game, I designed and tweaked how all of the underlying systems worked. This included how fast the bots move, how high they can jump, how the player bot and the other bots physically interact with each other, and fun traits that bots can have, like the rumble bot which launches the player upwards when they hit the ground. I worked closely with our main level designer to design systems that would facilitate the creation of levels that were equal parts challenging and fun.