Lifted is a first person physics platformer. It was built with three other students in a period of three months as a final project for the Game Design Program at Vancouver Film School. I was the programmer and one of the lead designers. My proudest accomplishment while working on Lifted was that I programmed and designed the Procedural Mode. Lifted was my first Unity game and all programming was completed by myself. No borrowing from other games or web resources. Everything was written specifically for Lifted. We did make use of an analytics only API that I did not write (Playtomic) which has since ceased to exist. Below is a link to the complete game.

We focused on one easy to understand mechanic: you have a gun that shoots bounce pads. We call these bounce pads Lifts. Each Lift is designed to launch you a minimum height in the direction perpendicular to the surface you put the Lift on. Due to the very nature of this mechanic, we also designed the Lifts to bounce you back to the same height you fall from. This is a picture of the story mode!

The gameplay in Lifted was heavily inspired by Quake 3 rocket jumping and Portal. I personally enjoy skill based games and getting the opportunity to make one like this was extremely satisfying. While working on Lifted, it was critical to me that every player's success or failure was clearly communicated to the player and most importantly: that the player knows that their success or failure was the result of their actions. This form of gameplay leads to a pleasant addiction for some types of players. It leaves them always wanting to play again because they want to challenge themselves to do it faster and better than before. With Pro Mode, there are effectively an infinite number of levels which allows any player who enjoys this gameplay to play forever.

Pro Mode is a mode that I worked on to retain some of the feelings we enjoyed about our prototype which were lost during the creation of Story Mode. Pro Mode generates a vertical world that you are tasked with climbing to the top of. Above this paragraph is a picture of the bottom of Pro Mode. Below this paragraph is a picture of the top of Pro Mode.

Pro mode is a lot like climbing a mountain. You'll have to fight against the environment and deal with obstacles as you encounter them. But the best part about Pro mode is the fact that it has nearly infinite levels. Every time you play, there is a new mountain.

I hope you will try to beat our story mode and climb a few mountains!

Thomas Halley