Splodge is a free form side scrolling game where the players control living blobs of ink, on a sketchbook themed setting. The players must stay on the paper in order to survive and reach the end of the level, avoiding black ink and other obstacles. A wave of black ink chasing the players is the main threat and motivation to finish the level.

The game takes place on a 2D plane within a 3D world, i.e. paper, on a desk populated with 3D objects. The game’s aesthetics are focused around a sketchbook theme (pencil sketches, simple drawings, doodles etc.). Players interact with the world and each other by expelling their colour and ink onto the game world in order to clear paths through black ink, attain power-ups, or attack each other.

Splodge received the highest marks out of all the games produced that year and won the UWE Games “Game of the year”.

Our team consisted of me, Dominic Corner, Liam Humphreys, Martin Aldridge and Simon Herring. I took on a design and producer style role for the duration of the project but was also involved with feature implementation and bug fixes. We all had input into the initial design, however I made sure not to throw out any concept or mechanic to quickly, giving equal thought to a lot of possible options to prevent us from being constrained in the future by the over emphasis of a certain mechanic. I designed the second and third levels in the game (the first one evolved naturally through play testing).

Part of the specification for the project was to include co-operative and competitive elements in the game. I spent a lot of time designing and iterating on the game’s core mechanics that would provide these elements as a core feature of the gameplay, rather than relying on set pieces to denote co-operative / competitive sections.

I also worked to organize the group and set weekly tasks by organizing weekly scrum meetings to enhance cross-team communication. During crunch time I worked to prioritize areas of development to ensure all team members were working on the most vital parts of the game. I also created several of the 3D assets in Maya as can be seen bellow.

I’m immensely proud of the game we created and the final build can be downloaded here.

(.NET Framework 4.0 and XNA redistributable required)