What is Suck It Up?
Suck It Up! Is a rogue-lite twin stick shooter where you suck up cruel coworkers’ insults and shout them back at them.
Genre: Twin stick rogue-lite
Platform: Steam
Players: Single/ Co-op
Suck It Up is a fast-paced isometric action game created during a 48-hour Global Game Jam at SCAD Savannah, where it won Best in Show and after the Jam it Won best is in Georgia at the Georgia Game Developers Association.
While I wasn't a part of the project at the during this time i asked to join the team as a level designer to help them push for there steam release.
The Concept and Design
For these levels I wanted to expand on Suck It Up’s current level design philosophy, by experimenting with how large and difficult I can make the levels while still keeping it fun and engaging for players.
These levels are intended to be either mid or late game levels, thus by the time a player encounters these levels they would already have a understanding of the game’s objectives and game play. While also have a few items to boost their overall power.
The overall idea for all the levels was to make these offices seem like a miserable place to work, cramp spaces, and nonsensical layout. I want the reaction of players to the levels to be “wow, this is a miserable place to work”.
Level Layouts
My own design, I wanted to create something unique compared to Suck it Up’ current level design and layout.I wanted to create something u
Reference
Reference
Block-outs
When it came to creating the levels, the process was relatively quick and easy, thanks to Suck It Up’s great dev tools.
Here are a few examples of the Suck It Up’s development tools.
Here are a few examples of the Suck It Up’s development tools.
After I blocked out the levels, I learned why the Suck it Up’s original levels are not large. It is because if the levels are too large it breaks the flow of the game, and with the current camera fov the player can easily become lost if they lose their reference points of where they are on the level. So, in response I downscale my initial block outs, they are still much larger than the base Suck it Up levels. But I wanted to make sure I didn’t break the already well-established flow of the game.
Playtest and Feedback
From my playtests with members of the Suck It Up team I was told that they liked the level layout and size for all 3 levels. As well as the unique shape of each level. One of the biggest pieces of feedback was at the levels themselves were too hard. Yet they liked the enemy placements and the amounts of enemies, so they recommended adding more health packs to the level.
Completed Levels
Looking back
Looking back on these levels I'm really happy about how they came out. My only wish being that I had more time to both work on them and create more levels. As of writing I'm currently in my senior capstone classes developing a game called “The Grand Bermuda” with that taking up most of my time. So, If I would change anything about this project is that I would have made more levels with interesting and weird office floor layouts. To see how far I could push them in terms of difficulty while still being fun the play