Specifications

• Single player game
• Created in 10 weeks -4 hours a day
• Using custom in-house engine
• Approximately 20 min of gameplay
   

My Contributions

• Game Design
• Main responsibility for levels;
  • Deserted Homeland  - level 1
  • Enlightened Village  - level 2
• Iterated on levels:
  • Arcane Summit          - level 3
  • Forgotten Forest       - level 4
• Main responsible for SFX and Music

The Team

Anton Pilmark - Level Designer
Victor Rasmussen - Level Designer
Adam Weith - Level Designer

Ellinor Sanders - Graphical Artist
Frida Åsling Sellius - Graphical Artist
Petter Gunnarsson - Graphical Artist

Hussein Taher - Programmer
Christian de Orleans - Programmer
Hannes Elofsson - Programmer
Gabriel Eriksson Cic - Programmer
Paulina Heiskanen - Programmer

Rasmus Björk - Technical Artist
Dag Bjärum-Bengtsson - Technical Artist

Uniform Vision
- A robust work method-

What made working on Kami different - besides having to think of a 3D space - was the immensely clear vision the team had from the very beginning. It took long meetings and a lot of time sunk into ideas that ultimately didn't work. But in the end we found out we wanted to do something entirely opposite of space shooting that were the norm of this project. We chose that we'd fly through hoops in a calm environment, focusing on cozyness rather than adrenalin.

Having that uniform vision was essential for us when we came a bit into the project and decided to take a drastic turn of mechanics. We went from having full control of our bird to being on rails. But since everyone knew what the game was about, redesigning the game design were not a problem which in many cases it would have been.

Composition Training
- Making memorable moments-

In this project our group had one of the most minimalistic game designs I've had in the past 2 years. That made room for other things to be explored in the levels other than them just 'working'. During the last 5 weeks of the project we began also allocating time to look our composition over on each of the levels. We even did a couple of workshops with our artist Ellinor Sanders, that gave us pointers on screenshots we had taken from a playthrough of each level. 

HelloIn this project our group had one of the most minimalistic game designs I've had in the past 2 years. That made room for other things to be explored in the levels other than them just 'working'. During the last 5 weeks of the project we began also allocating time to look our composition over on each of the levels. We even did a couple of workshops with our artist Ellinor Sanders, that gave us pointers on screenshots we had taken from a playthrough of each level. 

Hoop Spacing
- A missing discussion-

In Kami you fly through hoops, and while the game turned out great, we could see in the final weeks that our levels played very unevenly. What we in the beginning had thought were to make our levels unique kind of stood out as a flaw in an otherwise wholesome game.

We had discussed that you should always be able to see the next hoop, but we never agreed on how far there should be in between them as level designers. This meant that we had a different amount of hoops in a 90 degree turn on most levels. Everything was winged and while it worked, I assume we would have been able to do more significant and surprising elements in the levels had we had a discussion about the spacing .In having a standard it would also allow us to break that standard and make more unique moments for the player.

Closing Thoughts

Kami has been one of the most enjoyable projects I've worked on in my 2 years. Everyone had a unified vision and it was inspirational how well everyone worked together to get the game to best it could be.

From a level design perspective we shared all the levels in between us having 1 person mainly responsible for each level. This was especially joyful since we had decided on what each of the levels gameplay purpose were. It was extremely interesting to delve into composition and work thoroughly with that.

All in all Kami was amazing to work on and ended up being one of my favorite games I've worked on.