This project consisted of 4 programmers 2 artists and myself. My title was creative director on this project but I also managed to implement most of the levels. I implemented roughly 2/3rds of the games 35 levels. The game used 2D orthographic tiles with parallaxing backgrounds. Levels were roughly 2-3 minutes in length. The design attempted to be much more accessible, reducing the need to make complex jumps. In levels in the beginning of the game, many did not require the player to jump. Ledges, elevators and inclines allowed the player to get a feeling that levels had a vertical component. As the player progressed, the were graduated into levels that required simple and then more complex jump puzzles. The ratio of character size to screen size was also much larger than most traditional platformers. We wanted He-Man to be large on the screen, partly to emphasize the muscular nature of the character but also to increase the casualness of the gameplay. Level design had to consider that the character was almost 1/3rd of the screen big on reference device. Combat gameplay, platforming and enemies were all tuned to facilitate the large character size. We chose not to include a dynamic zoomable camera as we always wanted He-Man to be large and the game to feel casual.
