“Clockwork Climb” NHSGA Original Game

This is Clockwork Climb, a video game for the Android platform made by Team XIV in three weeks for Carnegie Mellon University’s National High School Game Academy. It’s a physics-based action-strategy puzzle game in which the player must guide a set of marching cuckoo birds from start to finish through a series of 2D levels. However, the player does not have direct control over the cuckoo birds: the player’s only means of control is to draw lines on screen, which turn into bouncy “belts” that the birds can bounce off of to be flung, hopefully towards the goal.

Each cuckoo bird acts as its own unit. If it’s on the ground, it will march forward. If it hits a wall, it will turn around. If it walks off of a ledge, it will jump. It has a maximum velocity. When it touches a bouncy belt, there is a minimum velocity with which it will bounce. Those are the cuckoo birds’ only scripted interactions. Everything else is entirely physics-driven.

The main challenge is to find a way to bounce the birds to the end of each level without losing any to the game’s various dangers. There are rewards for speed, strategy, and finding collectibles. In total, the game contains 36 puzzle levels, plus six bonus levels with unique mechanics unlocked by collecting enough rewards.

My favorite part of this project is the originality behind its concept. An issue we had while testing the game during development was that many of the testers would have trouble at first figuring out how to effectively control the cuckoo birds. I figured it could be traced back to the game’s unusual style of play: the player is clearly in charge of the birds, but it’s by controlling their environment rather than controlling them directly. It’s a unique way to play a game and, combined with the physics-based scenario, makes for a gameplay experience that is rewarding and challenging to master, yet still very intuitive (at least once you get the hang of it).

Team XIV consists of 5 members: Alexander Liu (artist and producer), Ryan Nguyen (artist), Thomas Zhao (sound designer), Andrew Koes (programmer), and myself (programmer). We got some help from the TAs and professors running the program, but most of that help  focused on ironing out some technical issues and a few creative disputes. My biggest contributions were with most of the game’s core mechanics: the cuckoo-bird script, the camera system and controls, and the level creation system. I also proposed the original gameplay concept that inspired the game.

The game was built in the Unity game engine. Unity worked as a platform for us to design the game by implementing our resources together using helpful design paradigms. Unity also provided the 2D physics and 3D rendering engines that were vital to the game. We used all original resources created from scratch or with the help of tools including ZBrush and CMU’s audio library.

The design of the project was greatly inspired by three games: Angry Birds, Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem, and the Trampoline Time minigame from New Super Mario Bros. DS.

We started on two fronts, creating paper diagrams of how the game as a whole would come together and playable prototypes of the core gameplay mechanics. We split our efforts by each taking up different parts of the project and tying each section of the game together as it became ready. We frequently playtested with both one another and passersby to get feedback on specific mechanics. These were some of the parts I was responsible for:

The cuckoo-bird script is the core of the entire game. Detecting and reacting to ground, walls, ledges, etc. amongst the chaos of the physics engine was a surprisingly complex challenge that I was constantly fine-tuning throughout the course of the entire project.

The camera system is, as I repeatedly told my team, one of those things that’s vital to a game, yet you don’t notice it unless it’s done poorly. The camera was one of the biggest parts we had to work out with playtesters, and I put a lot of care into making sure it unobtrusively kept all necessary parts of the stage in view while intuitively keeping the player in control.

The level creation system worked using a grid on which level elements could be drawn. The simple yet powerful system is what enabled us to produce so many levels in such a short period of time.

Creating Clockwork Climb was an incredible experience for me. The tight schedule forced me to work harder and longer than I ever had before, and I learned a lot about how I do my work and how to maximize my efficiency. Most of all, it taught me to love what I do and to love everything collaborative, because had any of us on Team XIV been working alone, Clockwork Climb would have turned out to be just a fraction of what it finally became.