My contribution

• Game System Design
  I created the original pitch for what should become Couch Monsters and presented it to the team. Together with another game designer I finetuned the mechanic and worked out what else the game needs and what not.
• Level/Puzzle Design
  I created the major part of the 30 puzzles (=levels). They usually started as a sketch on paper and were quickly transformed into an playable in-engine blockout. Often I designed a key moment or interaction first and then build a whole level around this. The blocked out levels were tested by the team first and then handed to external testers. When a level has proven fun and operational, it was given to the artists. When designing the levels, I had to cater to various requirements and constraints. Each level had to fit on a single screen, which limited the possibilities. It also meant, that the level components needed to be layouted in a visually appealing composition. We needed puzzles of all levels of difficulty and only had a limited amount of different game mechanics available, so I tried to come up with as many different use cases for the same mechanics (and combinations of them) as possible. This resulted in the game having a good amount of variety without the added need of developing additional features.
• Programming
  I also was 50% of the technical team, tasked with writing a lot of code and handling the project in Unity. This includes (but isn’t limited to) writing an input system, setting up the UI, creating the animation controller for the characters and handling localization.
• Localization
  As briefly touched on in the previous point I was responsible for handling the localization of the game into 11 languages. I set up everything in Unity, maintained the localization sheets and communicated with the translators.