The main concept for the game was for it to be a story centered game showing a puppy's adventures.
With that idea in mind, the first step was to define the route the main character would follow.
Many different approaches were explored on this topic and finally the story lost its priority as a main guide for the design.
As a team, we defined the countries to visit:
For each country we chose some iconic places to show and decided to start working on the art and level design.
The game's ending and story remained undefined and very blurry for a big part of the project, abandoning the idea of making it guide the design.
This resulted to be one of the main aspects in which the project strayed away from the original concept.
In the second stage this key point was considered again and reinforced more strongly to ensure the creative vision was fulfilled.
The game's genre was decided to be platformer. As such, it was impossible not to look at the genre's defining titles.
Highly inspired by Donkey Kong Country we defined the obstacles and drafted the base levels.
Since we didn't have a dedicated level designer, this responsibility was highly divided. As a result, many team members came up with their own versions of how the levels should be, leading to many iterations and difficulty to reach consensus on this topic.
The final levels included in the MVP did not follow any difficulty progression and were not arranged in a very logical way.
However, they served well to the purpose of testing the main mechanics and exploring the different aesthetics involved in every country included.
Having a puppy as the main character helps to define the main mechanics on an early stage. However, they have to fit the game's genre and generate a fun experience.
The first mechanics defined were:
It was also important to define the progression. I decided to enable each skill in a different country in order to make the travel mechanic more rewarding and also lifting some weight from the initial tutorials.
Barking is available from the start while digging became available from the second country to visit (Mexico) and sniffing was the last to be revealed, in Chile.
To make the character interact with the enemies and scenario, barking became the character's main attack giving the player the ability to stun enemies and walk past them.
Sniffing and digging would allow the puppy to find hidden rewards or discover secret passages.
These early definitions were the foundations for the more polished work that took place during the second stage of the development.
Although the mechanics in this stage felt pretty raw and some interactions seemed somewhat inconsistent, later on they offered many variations to work with and allowed me to expand the character's interactions with the World.
Jumpy Paws was the first project I tackled with a professional mindset as it was the first project to be released by my newly founded Game Dev company, Raincup Games.
Therefore, the takeaways are huge and very relevant to me as a founder and as a developer as well.
I managed to acquire a Government funding to create the first prototype, assembled a team, designed and defined the basic elements of a game and made many mistakes along the way! All of which remain as valuable lessons to be applied and remembered in the next projects. Starting with Jumpy Paws' next stage.