Greenhill Hero

Project of My Machine in collaboration with elementary school grade students.

Group project with:
Karel Lommaert
Kevin Loddewykx
Lode De Proft [Linkedin]
Marianne Peeters

The evil wizard Frustrato is spreading depression over the village and makes all the villagers angry.
Stun the angry villagers by shooting pastry in their face.
Make the villagers happy again by activating the Peace Makers which spread joy.
Defeat frustrato and bring down his tower to save the city.

MyMachine is an initiative that started in Kortrijk, Belgium.
It's goal is to make students work together from different educational steps.
Elementary students think up the ideas while college students make them a reality.

We worked together with the school Groenheuvel ( = Greenhill in english) from Bissegem.
We had a class of 12 students ranging from 8 to 12 years old which all made a drawing of their dream machine.
Our task was to make a game that includes all 12 of these machines as gameplay elements.

Next to implementing the machines the goal was to make a game targetted at children between 8-12 years old.
MyMachine also asked us to not include any text so children internationally could play it.

We worked through a lot of iterations of movement to find the best fitting one for the children.
There were already a few avid fifa players between them who easily played a third person platformer.
But the most of them had a lot of problems with the depth and aiming correctly so we changed the game to a 2D platformer.

I wrote the Camera movement as a smooth following camera influenceable by points to get a nice effect.
I also wrote the base of the player movement on which another programmer further iterated

Our team consisted of four programmers and one artist even though this was quite an art-heavy project.
Acordingly all of the programmer pitched in to create the many assets we needed.
I mainly created particle systems, made all the cutscenes and rigged and animated the flying car.

Interaction had to be crystal clear, everywhere you could do an interaction there were obvious particles.
If you could press a button there was always a button indicating what to press with visual feedback if you were pressing it.
The button dynamically switched depending on you using a controller or keyboard.

The menu's had to be easily understood and a little childish.
I created a circle based menu system and made it work with mouse, arrows and controllers.
Everything needed to be done using icons as no text was allowed.

Picking the right outfit for your avatar can take hours but we love every second of it.
When the children visited our school we showed them the outfitter with few clothes and they were stoked.
We let them draw their own clothing on the whiteboard of which we took inspiration for the rest of the clothes.

I wrote wardrobe system for the clothes and hooked it into my user interface.

A boss fight was inevitable as we already used Frustrato as the bad guy in our workshop and the kids really liked the idea.
I created a simplistic boss fight with three stages each containing their unique sets of attacks.
To defeat Frustrato you need to evade all his attacks while shooting at him and deplete his health.

Download for Windows from mediafire

Download for Mac from mediafire