About Galactic Goo

Galactic Goo is a Marble-Rolling Puzzle game, inspired by the games Mercury Meltdown and Super Monkey Ball. It was made by a team of 12 students over an 8 week period. You play as the space-travelling Glub, an alien ball made of slime who gradually shrinks as he moves around, and must find the pieces of his crashed rocket ship spread across the intergalactic highway, so that he may return to the cosmos. Galactic Goo is a game of resource management and light puzzling, with 6 levels to play.

My Role

My role within the team was one of two level designers, and we were both involved in the concepting for the game. I was even the one to suggest making the environment a space setting. Once the mechanics were settled on we sketched level ingredient ideas, whiteboxed the various levels, and iterated them based on data gathered through playtests. I was directly responsible for the creation of levels 2, 3, 5, and 6, and played a part in the creation of the switch/gate mechanic. This was my first game project made in a team with dedicated programmers and artists, and also the first 3D game I worked on.

Documentation was an important aspect of this game’s creation, with Decision Matrix’s, Level One-Pagers, and Game Design Guides playing a big role in the development of the concept. I was responsible for creating all of the Level One-Pagers, documents that gave an overhead of the features, intended player experience, layout, and difficulty a level would have, which would inform our whiteboxing process. Keeping note of playtesting data in a feedback document also had a large impact on the game, as all the levels needed to go through a major overhaul due to initial player feedback on their length, which made the levels much more palatable by the end of development.

Additional Notes

Teamwork was the central focus for this project, as it was the first time many of us had worked in a larger team, and without proper teamworking skills and pipelines the project would have collapsed. We employed the team management framework Scrum, and participated in Peer Reviews to ensure the development process was smooth, team members knew what their roles and responsibilities were, and what individual tasks we had to work on. For me as a level designer, communication with the environment artists was important to ensure the beautification process could function unimpeded. Levels were built in a modular fashion to facilitate ease of adding art assets, which allowed for rapid implementation of the art pass, something made even more important by the number of levels present.

In-game screenshots.

A look at the level in-engine.

Progression of ingredients from sketch to final pass whitebox.