NEW JOE & MAC : CAVEMAN NINJA

STUDIO : MR.NUTZ STUDIO

NEW JOE & MAC : CAVEMAN NINJA  is a remake of the game released on arcade in 1991.

A very challenging platformer that can be played by two players.

The pre-production of the project was mainly done alone, leaving the rest of the team to finish the patches on ASTERIX & OBELIX: SLAP THEM ALL!. I therefore analyzed in detail the gameplay of all the games in the franchise and the various ports for different consoles in order to establish and rationalize both the level of fidelity to be achieved in the title and what could be brought to the title without betraying the heart of the franchise.

With this analysis, I was able to put together numerous design documents to help with the creation of the game (documents that will be fleshed out later by the game designer who will join the project later in production). 

Because yes, the opus is not just a simple remake of the original game, it has a whole additional section called EXTEND MODE, which adds 15 extra levels to the game, making it four times longer than the original game, as well as additional game modes.

So I had the huge task of designing, prototyping, and building these 15 new levels, which were four times longer than the 15 levels in the original game, while staying true to the original design. To do this, I tried to add an extra platforming dimension to these new levels that wasn't present in the base game, in the spirit of what the sequels brought to this area.

I therefore designed and prototyped numerous gameplay elements that expanded the range of obstacles the player might encounter, keeping only the best ones that would have the most impact in the game given the limited development time we had.

I also tried to add levels with much more verticality, camera movement, and path choices to follow the macro logic of choosing between two alternative levels at the end of certain levels. The goal was to allow players to vary the repetitiveness of runs due to the difficulty of the game, which was left unchanged for the sake of fidelity and the target audience.

Additional game modes have also been added, such as speedrun, hardcore (only 1 life), and boss rush.

In addition to this level design work, I was responsible for tracking and supervising the bug database filled in by the external QA team and keeping it constantly up to date to allow the whole team to have a clear view of the progress of the project's bugs, removing any duplicates or bugs that weren't really bugs, and even reporting back to the QA team when their reproduction steps weren't clear enough.

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