La Voz del Jaguar
Mad Bricks
Game Designer - Level Designer - UI/UX
La Voz del Jaguar is a Metroidvania style action-platformer game for PC and Consoles. This project started with the idea of making a game out of a book with the same name, Illustrated by Pedro Ruiz and written by Clarisa Ruiz and Nathalie Léger-Cresson.
Responsibilities:
Co-designed progression system.
Co-design main character, enemies and boss mechanics.
Co-designed levels.
Co-designed gameplay narrative.
Designed and implemented game screens and UI elements.
The first challenge as a Game Designer in this project was to create a set of mechanics by which the character presented in the book could fit in the context of a platformer. In the book, the character’s Call to Adventure is the roar of the Jaguar Spirit. He has to face a series of spiritual challenges in order to find the source of the roar. For the game, we wanted the player to have the option to switch between the boy and the jaguar, both with different abilities that the player had to unlock throughout the gameplay, thus, giving the game the Metroidvania style that we wanted the game to have.
In this first iteration of the mechanics, the boy could jump, walk, climb walls, slide, and move objects in the world. The jaguar could wall jump and dash. A double jump could be performed when switching between characters in mid-air.
After a lot of play testing and evaluation of the game, we decided to change the boy-jaguar changing at will mechanic as the players will rather play as a Jaguar for the full length of the experience and for the design, the boy abilities and constraints were an important factor to keep the game balanced between the slower puzzles sections and the fast paced ones. We gave the boy the ability to earn the spiritual power from the jaguar to make him powerful and use it only when the spiritual bar was filled after collecting a certain amount of collectibles, so that the player couldn’t abuse this ability.
As a Metroidvania style game, its levels needed to be designed in such a way that there was a high replayability factor. We created a skill tree divided into three different branches each with different sets of abilities that the player could choose along with the gameplay. The first branch was for combat, the second was for speed and agility and the third was for spiritual abilities.
Each level had to fit each of the abilities the player chose to invest time on. For the level design, I started playing old and modern Metroidvania games always with a piece of paper in hand. Every time I encountered an engaging section at a level, I draw them in a separate piece of paper. After tons of hours playing different games, I combined some of the best sections I encountered and work on top of them so that they could fit the narrative outline for our game.
