Hi, I’m Jacob Youakim, creator of the minigame “The Back” for our game Inconvenience Store and I am here to explain a bit of the process of the creation of this minigame. “The Back” is a minigame that really brings out the ridiculousness that our game can offer. From its conception, the back was modeled after the idea that customers don’t really know what happens in the back of a store. It is some kind of abstract area that exists only in the mind. Customers often ask employees to check the back for something and that's exactly what you do in “The Back”. To really play on this concept I made the minigame a platformer where you climb up these giant shelves to retrieve an item (toilet paper) and bring it back to the customers.
With the help of our artist Brooke, I first did some concepting.
After concepting I decided to do blockmeshing and playtest some levels. The first iteration of the blockmesh looked like this after some playtesting.
After more testing I decided that this design was much too compact and difficult. Eventually, I made another blockmesh with clearer and easier pathing.
After more playtesting and determining that this level was the level that we wanted to go forward with, I worked on creating it from our game assets and finalized models. Now it's at the point where it is pretty much finalized minus some textures. This is the current state of the minigame.
This minigame has been a blast to work on from a level design and coding perspective. Small yet important details include how the camera rotates around a central point as the player platforms and when objects get close to the camera they dither and become semi-transparent, all of those were very fun to work on. I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek into the development of our minigame “The Back” and we look forward to you eventually being able to play it in the full game.