Meltdown

Meltdown was a 4 person project over the course of 4 months. There were two level designers, one artist, and myself working in the SMU Guildhall's proprietary 2D engine called GuildEd. There was also a producer who was in charge of multiple projects including ours, and another level designer who was only with the team through the proof of concept technology milestone.

The game Meltdown is a 2D two-player co-operative platformer and puzzle game. The two characters have unique abilities and have to make use of their strengths to solve the puzzles together. For example, in the screenshot above, the smaller character must squeeze through a gap in the floor. Once through, the larger character must pull the levers to turn off the electric currents to let him through. Their goal is to collect machine parts to repair the nuclear facility they are in before it goes critical.

My primary responsibilities as the sole software developer on the team were the creation of new gameplay features, identifying the cause of and fixing bugs, and general game design. The GuildEd engine is a library of Lua scripts that interact with an underlying graphics and physics layer. All of the development I did on the project was within the Lua library.

The existing library supports a basic single player platformer. However, it makes a number of assumptions about gameplay that were a challenge to overcome. In particular, it assumed a single player, and it handled many interactions as if the player was a unique entity. This proved to be a challenge for our two-player game.