Marshmallow Masters was developed with a team of 7 Game Designers and 3 Sound Designers over the span of 2 semesters. It was our Capstone project for our final year of Sheridan's Bachelor of Game Design program. It's made to run on Android devices and uses different mechanics such as tapping or shaking for each minigame.

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The game has players walk around a campground where they can choose to play 6 different minigames where successful playthroughs reward marshmallows. Originally, the marshmallows were used to upgrade the camp, but we didn't have enough time to implement this feature. In the future we plan to continue working on this game and adding this feature in.

 

My role was originally to be the Level Designer along with another member, however, my role ended up changing and I took on more of a programming job. I edited code for 2 of our minigames, Flashlight B. Brokey and Shoo Shoo Mosquito to create different difficulty levels on the game.

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For Flashlight B. Brokey, players have a sanity bar and a flashlight battery bar. When the battery charges, which is done by shaking the phone, the light is off, meaning the sanity bar goes down. When the light is on, the sanity bar goes up, but the battery drains. When the sanity bar reaches 0, the player loses. If the player keeps the sanity above 0 by the time the escape from the forest bar fills up, they win. I adjusted these values and play tested them in order to find what fit and was still winnable. The level 2 difficulty was already created, so I created difficulties for levels 1 and 3. Level 1 was made to be easy without too much effort, but level 3 was meant to be hard. Players need to master the other difficulties before attempting level 3 to learn and find out what the best strategy is for winning.

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For Shoo Shoo Mosquito, players need to swipe mosquitoes on their screens in order to get rid of them. The mosquitoes fly from on side of the screen to the other. If a mosquito makes it to the opposite side of the screen, the player loses a life. After 4 lives are lost, the player loses. To win the player must survive for the time limit. Like in the previous minigame, I created the level 1 and 3 difficulties. For level 1, the mosquitoes move at the slowest pace of all difficulties, making it quite easy to win. For level 3, the mosquitoes still only take 1 swipe to defeat, but are extremely fast, while still being able to be reacted to. I tested this game many times as well to make sure the difficulties felt just right.

 

 The other roles I did were coming up with initial minigame ideas, in which 2 of them made it into the final 6, as well as running playtest sessions. After my sessions, I had found bugs that the team wasn't aware of, like Shoo Shoo Mosquito being unplayable after going back to it a second time. There was also a case of just general control where the testers found it too sensitive, so that got changed as well.