Volt Vault

As most (kind of) great things do, Volt Vault started from a want to make a video game that we would actually release into the world. As a couple of high school students we had worked on developing video games. We set crazy high hopes for these games, but as many ideas turn out to be, they were quite a bit out of our reach. At the end of high school we pulled back and decided to make fun games that were on a much smaller scale . However, as we learned quickly, it’s difficult to design even simple games.

Our first challenge became deciding on game play mechanics, specifically how our little electric dude should jump. We had originally considered having our little dude actually vault around the level with a pole, but we felt this limited possible obstacles that we could set up, so we stuck with a normal jump.

Jump height control usually isn’t left up to the players in platformers, so we decided to directly influence that, allowing players not only to control when they jumped, but exactly how high. This gave us confidence and freedom when designing difficult obstacles , thus making the game more engaging and fun.

Once we had the basics of mechanics, we needed to decide on an artistic style. We knew from the name that it was going to be electric themed, but we hadn’t decided exactly what we were going for. We needed to design the platforms that players run on first, so we started with a complicated circuit design that had some flair to it.

However, we found this complicated style distracting to the user playing the game. Instead we opted for a simpler look, using only small screws as decoration.

From here we went on to design the character. The idea here was to make him as circuit as possible. The goal was to imagine that you could build this little dude with basic things in your garage. This led to an LED head and a battery for power. From there everything else just came fairly naturally.

The next element we needed was a way to communicate the upcoming jump to the player. Because we included the control of how high the player could jump, we already had an idea of how we wanted to accomplish this. It was just a matter of designing and testing some simple ideas.

We ended up staying with this design for jump mechanics. Nice and simple, it felt fairly self explanatory and oddly satisfying to use.

In order to play the game, we still needed animations. Running was as simple as running is, the interesting part that we found was the jump. We had recently seen a YouTube video of an Olympic long jumper jumping over Mini Coopers. When he cleared the cars his arms spun in circles. We found this visual really cool , and so spawned the animation of our character’s arm movements within the jump that we have in the game. This gave our runner a unique style.



Next Time: Designing a game that is fun and challenging to play.