Arboreal

"Arboreal" is a platformer/metroidvania where you play as a lizard climbing a tall tree. As you explore, you unlock "Evolutions" that grant you new ways to traverse the tree! Features many upgrades, multiple endings, and a bunch of achievements. Arboreal was published to Steam on February 2022 & has a 95% positive review score out of about 20 reviews.

My first semester of university ended with us being tasked to make a complete "platformer" game. This platformer needed 3 levels, a couple unique interactions, and obviously had to well, work. This was our very first semester of game design; most of us barely knew how to write code that moves a square left and right. In all my genius, I decided that I wanted to make my platformer good enough to publish to Steam.

This was an absolute dive into cold water for me. I dedicated about 4 months of my time working daily for many hours on concepting/designing levels, programming game mechanics, learning music composition, but mostly just hitting my head against a wall when things didn't go the way I planned. Arboreal was both a lesson in how much I could do if I put my mind to the task, and in how many things you have to cut or change during development in order to hit deadlines and goals.

Arboreal was especially a complicated beast for me due to me wanting to make a metroidvania on top of a platformer. This meant that the game had to be nonlinear to some degree, and that it had to account for players possibly never seeing certain parts of the game while still keeping the experience consistent for everyone. Most "rooms" (this was the level equivalent) in Arboreal had to be traversable from top to bottom, as players may explore to find all the game's collectables.

By the start of December, I submitted the game to my class, and got a full score. I've gone far above what the rubric wanted, at the cost of my free time and social life. But, I still wasn't done with my own goals. I wanted to learn how to use the basics of Steam's SDK, which involved me reading through fresh non-Unity documentation for the first time and troubleshooting things I barely understood. I wanted to add achievements too, to encourage players to see everything Arboreal had to offer. Somehow, I still had energy, so I added a secret hidden boss for players that dare to explore every corner of the game. Most folks I know have never seen this part of Arboreal, and that makes it feel just that much more special to me.

I released Arboreal on Steam for free in February, 2022. It somehow gained a small bit of traction, as someone added it to an "easy to get achievements" game pack, or similar? I don't know exactly how this works, but I believe that getting 100% completion on Arboreal would give people levels on their Steam account. And since Arboreal was free, they didn't have to pay anything! This led to the game getting a couple thousand downloads and hundreds of launches from people. I was very proud and happy to see this small yet unexpected success.

After I finished Arboreal, I completely crashed the next semester of university. I worked myself to bits, and couldn't stand looking at games for the next couple of months. I grumpily and tiredly worked through my classes, still doing fine, but was really worried that I killed my motivation for games. Luckily, this was not the case. I just needed rest.

"Needing rest" is still a concept I am struggling to grasp to this day.