Action Henk
Level Designer
A speed-running platformer
Summary
Action Henk is a speed-running platformer developed by RageSquid and released on May 11th, 2015 for PC, and March 2016 for PS4 and Xbox One. The game features over 70 tracks all set in different environments, 5 playable characters, dedicated grappling hook levels, a whole host of medals to beat, and a fullly-fledged level editor.
My Role
I was responsible for the creation and implementation of levels in Unity, responsible for a total of 33 levels that have shipped with the game. I worked at Ragesquid for a period of 6 months as part of my internship. During my time at Ragesquid, I made quick sketches of possible level designs, before building them in Unity. If I got stuck when building or sketching, or simply ran out of ideas, I often switched between work methods; either drawing out a level in its entirety, or just creating a level from scratch within the engine without any prior sketches, quickly iterating based on new additions and changes to the design and merging sections together.
Action Henk is a speed-running platformer developed by RageSquid and released on May 11th, 2015 for PC, and March 2016 for PS4 and Xbox One. The game features over 70 tracks all set in different environments, 5 playable characters, dedicated grappling hook levels, a whole host of medals to beat, and a fullly-fledged level editor.
My Role
I was responsible for the creation and implementation of levels in Unity, responsible for a total of 33 levels that have shipped with the game. I worked at Ragesquid for a period of 6 months as part of my internship. During my time at Ragesquid, I made quick sketches of possible level designs, before building them in Unity. If I got stuck when building or sketching, or simply ran out of ideas, I often switched between work methods; either drawing out a level in its entirety, or just creating a level from scratch within the engine without any prior sketches, quickly iterating based on new additions and changes to the design and merging sections together.
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ShowcaseA small showcase of a few of my favorite levels for Action Henk. With each difficulty, the room for error decreased, causing timing, precision, and memorization to become more important as the player progressed through the game.
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Learning Experiences
The main thing I took away from working on Action Henk was forcing myself to be creative. As the amount of game mechanics and level interactions were few, it eventually got more difficult to create interesting and fun new levels as time went on. In order to get myself out of this creative rut, I forced myself to make a lot of loose sketches of level sections before building them in the engine and testing whether they were fun. It was a process of moving between paper and digital, and iterating on the fly -- a valuable one that I keep falling back to today.
The main thing I took away from working on Action Henk was forcing myself to be creative. As the amount of game mechanics and level interactions were few, it eventually got more difficult to create interesting and fun new levels as time went on. In order to get myself out of this creative rut, I forced myself to make a lot of loose sketches of level sections before building them in the engine and testing whether they were fun. It was a process of moving between paper and digital, and iterating on the fly -- a valuable one that I keep falling back to today.