Jordan Newton
Mumble: A Tumble in Time is a 3D action-adventure platformer inspired by the PS2 era of platformers.
You play as Mumble, who can travel between two different time periods at will to stop evil robots from destroying the land, rescuing the local inhabitants along the way.
The brief
This project was created for my final production assessment in 2022.
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The assessment required that a playable game be delivered after a period of 5 months. During this time the project went through Alpha, Beta and Gold in which we had to submit a build at each subsequent deadline.
Frequent meetings were held with trainers who acted in the role of clients where the build and development plans were communicated and displayed.
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We also held multiple playtesting sessions on our own volition to make sure the game was on the right track and to sniff out any game breaking
bugs and exploits.
Team: Myself, 2 designers, 2 programmers and 4 artists.
Development Time: 5 months.
Engine: Unity
My roles
Vision Holder
My role as Vision Holder meant that I was in charge of making sure that all the content in the game was cohesive and matched the GDD that was created.
This involved constant communication with the team as a whole but also with the leads of each stream to make sure the the work being done was actually viable for the product being created.
Lead Designer
Being Lead Designer meant that I was responsible for the oversight of all design work being done to make sure it was useable for the project.
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As well as this I undertook level and puzzle design as well as lots of additional work listed below:
The level design I contributed to the game involved the design and creation of the bridge, factories, 2nd island and final puzzle area.
These changed based on collaboration with other team members as well as feedback from playtesting sessions
level design
Cutscenes
I created all of the cutscenes in the game in engine using unity's timeline package.
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This included character and object functionality during the cutscenes, animation, camera animation & effects and audio
Intro Cutscene
Open Bridge Cutscene
Boss intro cutscene
platform activation cutscene
Cutscenes (using unity timeline)
Music (all except main menu theme)
Dynamic battle music functionality
Pause & options menus functionality
Moving platforms functionality
Trigger events functionality
Modular 'utility' scripts (can be combined to create complex events)
Controls menu
Click the buttons to fast travel!
Boss death cutscene
Music
Below are the tracks I put together using Soundtrap.
The tracks were made by combining loops and samples together whilst sticking with the theme of the game.
The tracks are a mixture of tribal & bongo drums and rock-esque guitars to keep them intense and thematic at the same time.
Main Loop
Battle Loop
Boss Music
UI
I created the UI menus below inside of unity using sprites the team had created as well as free to use control icons sourced online.
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programming
For this project I also did some of the programming, allowing the programmers to focus on larger more
complicated tasks.
The major scripts that I wrote for the project are listed below:
dynamic battle music
The dynamic battle music script uses Unity's built in audio mixers to dynamically switch between the normal and battle music tracks, when an enemy is targeting the player
The video below demonstrates this in action.
Moving Platforms
The Moving platform script I created was designed to be as modular as possible, allowing it to be adapted for multiple use cases. It was also designed to be as 'designer friendly' as possible when viewed from the inspector.
Gem pickup manager
This script controlled the collection of gems, the related UI and also the sound pitch changes when collecting gems.
Settings menu
