Arm of Satan
A fast-paced local-coop platformer. One player controls a girl, wrongly sent to hell. The other plays as her demonically possessed arm trying to help her escape.
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​My Roles
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Technical Designer & Programmer. I was in charge of designing, implementing and polishing mechanics and level features. This included creating a large part of the character controllers, all enemies, all level features and the menu flows.
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VFX Artist. All VFX in the game were created by me, excluding some of the custom sprites (which were made by our 2D artists).
Challenges
Many of the challenges I face during development were to do with creating the character controller. As the main part of the game, it's pretty important that it's good; especially when both players are engaging with it. A main point of iteration was the grabbing & climbing, because one player (the arm) needs to grab in order for the other player (the girl) to be able to jump again. Getting this core interaction working properly, feeling nice and handling intuitively when split across two brains needed a lot of work.
Another was keeping both players relevant, since arm can (awkwardly) clamber around and girl can (in theory) evade all the hazards. In practice, this was never going to work but it did lead to us rethinking the types of interactions we wanted. It drew us away from pure movement & fast-paced platforming into having longer levels with slower puzzle-esque moments.