As part of my current studies, I’m required to work with a team to develop two game prototypes. One is called Magical Spell Masters. The other—this one—is Parasite. Here’s the pitch:
Parasite is a 2D action platformer where the player controls a parasitic bioweapon that’s taken control of an unlucky scientist. This parasite allows the player to launch a huge tentacle from the host’s body that can be used to grapple around the map, hurl objects, impale enemies, and deflect incoming bullets. The player must use their newly acquired host to escape the facility they’re being contained in.
We’re taking our cues from things like Super Meat Boy, Dark Lands and Ape Out, both from gameplay and visual design perspectives. It’s heavily physics-based with an active ragdoll for the player character and—so far at least—has a slower and more fluid feel to those aforementioned influences. From a programming point of view, all these rigidbodies and arbitrary forces make some of the platform stuff tricky. Things like grounded checks become jankier when you’ve got all these colliders flopping about. But it’s fun to play with all the joints and constraints, and we’ve already laid a lot of the groundwork for our prototype.
There are a whole mess of challenges when you combine ‘physics-driven’ and ‘action’ into the same design. My general experience of physics-based platformers is that they’re necessarily imprecise; you never quite feel in control of the player. Some games, like Limbo and Little Nightmares, lean into this quality, driving home the vulnerability and powerlessness of the player. In others, like LittleBigPlanet, it helps nail that toybox feel. In all cases, I run into situations where I’m frustrated by jumps that don’t land where I need them to, or inputs that don’t register in the manner I expect.
So I was a little sceptical when I first read that Parasite was to be an action game. How can the player reliably target enemies with the tentacle when they’re swinging through the air? How will we find a balance between floatiness and speed? How will we give the player enough control to make reliable plans? We’re mulling over all of this now.
But we’re rather happy with progress so far. So here’s a bunch of pretty stuff to bring this to a close.
Various palette and design mockups:
Design mockups by Hannah Lamb 
Design mockups by Hannah Lamb 
Design mockups by Hannah Lamb 
Design mockups by Hannah Lamb
Some props and a prototype level:
Props by Chris Ottey 
Level prototype by Jibrill Murphy
Our player and enemy concepts:
Player concept by Hannah Lamb 
Enemy concept by Hannah Lamb 
Enemy concept by Hannah Lamb
A zombie-like active ragdoll:
That’ll do for now. More later!