Mountstrosity is a 3D Action - Adventure Sidescroller where you become the merciless monster, avoid the light and manipulate the world with your tentacle. Kill everything in sight, tear away vents that contain your vessel and slink in the shadows, avoiding the ever suffocating lights. Mountstrosity was my capstone project during my time at Circuit Stream, the goal was to encapsulate the scope of my learnings into a short game or prototype. During the initial ideation phase I knew that I wanted to create something that had the potential for unique level design and character movement as level design and visual scripting are areas that I enjoy and feel I do well in. Earlier in the course I created a 3D sidescroller as part of a short game jam that I really enjoyed crafting, wanting to build off the unique camera angle I settled on the idea of building another 3D sidescroller. The concept of doing damage inflicting lights had also crossed my mind at this point, which gave me the ability to create unique level designs. Around this time we had been learning about novel/different controllers and control schemes in games, wanting to incorporate unique character movement I thought of ways I could implement this myself. I thought that the unique directional movement allowed by sidescrollers meshed well with the omnidirectional movement of a computer mouse. Thus, the initial concept of Mountstrosity was born, a 3D sidescroller where you avoided light and the character was controlled entirely by the mouse.

Knowing how central movement is to creating a cohesive and enjoyable moment to moment gameplay in sidescrollers from personal experience I knew that it had to be my central focus during the prototyping phase. It took a long while to figure out to get the character to move in whatever direction the player held and dragged the mouse, I spent a good amount of my time on this. During this time I focused a lot on sound design as well, not only am I passionate about it but I really needed to craft the three C's well and a large part of the Character and Controller come with satisfying sound design. I playtested extensively with my class and friends, tweaking values of variables seemingly daily. At first the movement felt too sticky, then too quick, only getting it to an enjoyable state shorty after our last round of playtesting before submission. I could've spent the entire given month on the movement and I still wouldn't have perfected it. Instead, knowing I wanted to paint the full concept of my idea I did some basic level design and placed light obstacles.

In the end, I believe my time spent on the movement was well worth it, peers and my instructor both enjoyed it despite some of its rough edges, plus I found the learning of it invaluable. Areas that stood out in player's minds were the movement, sound design and overall cohesiveness and enjoyability of the aesthetic I created.