Wastelander demo (2015)
– Type: Demo level showcasing 2D animation
– Created in less than a week

About
When working at Saxion University of Applied Sciences, I gave lessons in 2D animation and Game Design. For the 2D animation lessons, my students were supposed to make a walkcycle animation in Flash along with a tile-based background. For the final assignment of the cluster, they needed to put their spritesheets into a level editor and make a simple platformer game out of their designs. This was a nice excuse for me to also learn them some level design essentials.

While the assignment was still in production, I took some time to make some 2D animations myself. In stead of using Flash, I decided to animate the old-fashioned way by drawing every keyframe manually in Photoshop to go for a hand-drawn look with some depth in it. The environment was done in Photoshop as well, consisting of seamlessly tileable building blocks. In the example above, you can see a first test I made with Flash before building an actual level with the tiles. The final product uses an in-house engine from Saxion, which unfortunately is not very stable, so I decided not to upload my whole level. I did include some screenshots of the level creation process (using the open source software Tiled) and some pics of the final product, as can be seen on the left.

The students made some great designs themselves and my demo was a good example for them, showcasing how to add some depth in a 2D sidescroller level.