Fresh From The Field — Limboo - By PHQ

Fresh From The Field — Limboo – By PHQ

Fresh from the Field is a weekly article series sharing the fresh and inspiring work of our Aotearoa Design Assembly community.

Halloween gets special treatment at PHQ. Each year they create a digital treat and last year they created a retro-inspired platformer game complete with two ‘alternate realities’…they even composed the soundtrack!

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The brief

At PHQ we have a special place in our hearts for Halloween. Every year, we create a small digital treat to share with our friends and this year was no exception. We invited everybody to escape the many realms of Limboo!

The Design Response

To make a game that’s fun, memorable and engagingly re-playable, we wanted to strike the right balance between challenge and reward. Because of our fondness for this genre, we chose a retro-inspired platformer game for this year’s treat.

With two ‘alternate realities’ to switch between, we added our own twist to the format. Using simple controls, players need to navigate between elements on two separate game-maps to make certain jumps and climbs. It’s an interesting challenge for players and was also for our design and technical team to pull off in the build.

‘Tiled’ was used to create and design the levels and early prototypes were built as a proof of concept for the realm-switching function, where two separate game-maps were needed. After that, the main challenge was designing the two realms to work together in a way that was challenging without becoming frustrating.

We used Pixi.js in combination with Tiled map editor to easily build maps that would be directly parsed, rendered and implemented into the game environment. Specific tilemap blocks and Tiled parameters were used to define game functionality including collision detection, spawn points and end points.

To add our finishing touches, we composed the music track, created the sound effects, and unleashed the realms of Limboo – all to give you a fun, addictive Halloween treat.