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Matthew Burchat
Portfolio Of
Game & Level Design
Esophaguys
Esophaguys is a local couch co-op party game where up to 4 players can play as elderly people with long, extendable necks. Players use their neck mechanics to traverse through levels and solve puzzles either alone or with a group of friends in this very weird and unique world.
This game was our team's capstone project for our fourth and final year of our game design program. We started working on this game in Semptember of 2021 and got to present the game at XP Game Summit in April. People loved the game and the industry guests who reviewed all the games at the event especially loved our wacky mechanics and interesting art style. Even though capstone was over by then, everyone on the team believed there was a lot more potential for the game and so we have been working on the game ever since.
Trailer for Esophaguys
Level and Game Design
There are a LOT of secondary mechanics for Esophaguys and I took all those mechanics and created fun levels for the players that are both enjoyable and a little bit challenging. When designing mechanics for Esophaguys, through lots of trial and error, I came to realize there were 3 questions I had to ask myself when designing good and effective mechanics for the game: 1: Does this mechanic effectively use the player's neck(s)? 2: How can this mechanic interact/combine with other mechanics? 3: Is it just fun to interact with? Those were the questions that needed a good answer when assessing designs for new secondary mechanics. Here are some quick examples of mechanics I designed that answered those questions and how they are used in some levels! Here is a link to some detailed breakdowns of certain mechanics here <-
Gnome tutorial
Gnomes:
Players must work together and use their traversable-neck to escort a constantly walking gnome from one point to another without letting it fall into any death pits!
Windmill and wintunnel interaction
Windmill windup:
Windtunnels can also speed up windmills which players can bite on and fling themselves super high!
Blocking windtunnel with trav-neck
Trav-neck Windtunnel:
Trav-neck can be activated by a button that turns the players neck into a solid object, allowing objects to collide with it, gnomes to walk on it and allowing the players to block windtunnel obstacles!
Electric Cluster 2 player chain (Work in progress)
Electric Clusters:
Players have to make a bite chain and act as a wire between two electrical nodes to charge unelectrified nodes and activate other interactable objects!
Solo sliding section
Sliding Sections:
Players go down a slide and have to quickly react to obstacles!
Co-op upside down terrain
Upside down terrain:
Gravity doesn't affect the esophaguys!
Documentation
I really enjoy doing documentation for everything in our game. I think a GDD is really important to keep everyone on the same page about what is happening in the game. Outside of a GDD, I do beat maps for the levels I create. It's a great way to plan out levels thoroughly before committing to something that may or may not work. Of course levels can play differently than how they are on paper (that's what prototyping is for) but the planned layout before putting everything in engine helps find any kinks or issue early on. They also communicate how I envision these levels to function, how they visually look, and anything else that goes on in them, again keeping everyone on the same page and a way to collect any feedback from the whole team, finding any flaws in the design or improving the design before fully building the levels. I have several different documents outside of the GDD from art concepts, mechanic designs, level layouts, and narrative structure plan each with a dozen or two dozen pages and I genuinely enjoy keeping things organized and written down so nothing gets forgotten!
Level Beat Maps
GDD Table of Contents
Design and Description for Game Mechanic
Accomplishments and Showcases
Esophaguys has a demo up on Steam and Xbox with a full release forthcoming
Check out more: https://www.esophaguys.com
Esophaguys has been featured in a number of showcases/festivals since continuing development after graduating school. Most notably:
- Day of the Devs in San Diego 2024
- LevelUp Showcase in Toronto 2022
- Hand Eye Society's Super Festival
- OTK Game Expo 2023 with 150,000 concurrent viewers
- Dreamhack Atlanta 2023
- Mix San Francisco 2024
- Tokyo Game Show 2024, Sense of Wonder grand prix award winners!
I went to the Dreamhack, Mix and Tokyo Game Show showcases myself and the best thing about these shows is seeing players actually play our game, laugh out loud with their friends/family and seeing people come back to play a second or third time because of how much they enjoyed it! Those experiences are what keep me motivated and remind me why I love making games.
Esophaguys on OTK Games Expo 2023 (1:46:00)
Day of the Devs 2024
Tokyo Game Show 2024: Sense of Wonder team picture
Dreamhack Atlanta 2023
Secondary Mechanic Breakdown:
Gnome:
We had a player mechanic we really wanted to explore called "Trav-neck". The player holds a button and while it's being held, other players can walk on the neck of the player "trav-necking" and secondary mechanics, like items, collide with the trav-necking player. Trav-neck although very fun and extremely interesting on paper, in practice didn't have a good use for the fact that at the time, it was just a worse bite mechanic. Players are able to bite each other's bodies and pick them up which allowed for players to bite objects at longer distances, farther than what player's trav-necking could. Because of this, we had a few ideas for mechanics, specific to trav-neck and from bouncing ideas around about items rolling along the players neck, I thought what if we had a creature that could walk along player's trav-neck that players had to escort to a certain location. We had a few ideas for gnomes in a narrative context and in the background as an environmental art but gnomes were a good use for this creature.
The gnomes as a mechanic are essentially AI that walk around aimlessly that the player has to escort to a location to do things like open a door that is blocking player progression. On paper it sounded interesting enough to prototype and when we play tested it, it was more fun than we thought it would be! The joy from this mechanic is not only the mechanic itself and how goofy it was but mostly the way players interacted with the mechanic both with their in-game player controller and having to communicate with each other to escort this gnome. In a scenario where there are multiple death pits that reset the gnome to its original spawn point, there is bound to be some friendly player banter when something goes wrong and that in itself is the enjoyment of this mechanic. It's interesting how the gnome itself isn't the only thing that is fun but how the mechanic enables the interaction between players more than anything, both in-game and out which is exactly the type of mechanic that a party game needs. There are scenarios/puzzles that solo players are able to use this mechanic but the most fun comes when the gnome is in a co-op setting.
Co-op Gnome Scenario (place holder)
Solo player gnome scenario
Sliding Sections:
This mechanic wasn't even necessarily intended but something that accidentally came to be, which are the best kind of accidents! Currently, the terrain/ground that we use is fully walkable by players, no matter the shape/angle of it. Even if the player gets flipped upside down or the terrain is a 90 degree angle, players can walk on it. To prevent players from walking everywhere, I have to place these colliders along the terrain where I don't want players to be able to walk on. The colliders essentially tell the player controller that they cannot walk on this surface and the player falls off the terrain if they attempt to stick to it in any way. When placing these colliders, I go in-game and test to see if these colliders actually do prevent players from walking to certain areas or if it bugs out in some ways. When testing a terrain that was placed at a 45 degree angle with the collider, I found that the player slides along the terrain. I used just this simple slide as a little fun environmental thing in some levels which I thought was enjoyable and also caught players off guard when seeing it for the first time. When designing the final level of a set of levels, I wondered if I could enhance this sliding mechanic in some way like having players sliding and grab a tree right before they fall into a death pit. That in itself was super fun and something entirely new to the game. I knew that a slide section in a level could have many possibilities to interact with our other traversal mechanics, especially for co-op scenarios. I ended up reworking some levels to include sliding sections because we had play testers enjoy them so much.
An example of a co-op sliding section in the game is where I have the players slide into a tree players can bite that is 1 neck length away and then shortly after a tree that is 2 neck lengths away, meaning after the first tree, 1 player has to bite another in order to use their combined neck length to be able to reach the second tree before they fall into a death pit and start over again. There are scenarios where I'll have a hazard that kills the player if they touch it and I'll make the hazard a half neck length high from the slide so players have to shorten their neck in order to avoid the hazard or have another scenarios that forces players to make a decision in a split second that in itself is stressful and sounds scary but is fun in a high intense situation. And if you aren't fast enough, then you'll remember for the next time and you have an excuse to ride the slide again!
Electric Clusters:
While we were showcasing at DreamHack Atlanta, we were discussing ideas for 4 person specific mechanics in our game, at the time, we only had co-op. We got home from a long day and the whole team went to bed pretty quick. At about 3am I was awoken by two other esophaguys developers having a snoring battle. It was hard to sleep so I just started thinking about potential mechanics for our game and I began to think about other co-op games for inspiration. It Takes Two is a game I look up to a lot and I thought about one of the earlier sections where players act as a connection between two live wires to let the electricity pass through them and it got me thinking about how that mechanic could translate to our game and having players chain together between two points, especially in 4 person levels which would be fun and a bit challenging. It's a great way to make players communicate with one another and we could even have scenarios where we can split up the players into 2 teams of 2 and have them solve puzzles to help each other progress.
How the mechanic works is there are charged clusters, uncharged clusters and electric powered sockets as we call them internally. Both clusters are static rock like objects that players can bite, charged clusters can turn uncharged clusters into charged clusters if connect via an Esophaguy chain. (Example if a player bites a charged cluster and hovers their body over an uncharged cluster, the uncharged cluster becomes a charged cluster). It's like you're transferring electricity between these clusters and the players act as the wire between the two. With the charged clusters, you can activated electric powered sockets which do things like open doors and rotate bridges which both add another layer to puzzle scenarios. A design technique that I thought of while making levels using this electric cluster mechanic is splitting players up so they have to work together even more so to progress. For example, players have to make a 2 neck length chain to have a charged cluster reach the electric powered socket and doing so opens a door or rotates a bridge for the other team of 2 that also have a cluster puzzle or a puzzle including some other mechanics featured in the level. It's a mechanic that is decent at a base level but has a lot of room to grow when combined with other mechanics and I'm really enjoying prototyping and designing levels using it!
First slide created
What sliding sections evolved to:
4 person chain electric cluster puzzle (placeholder)
split electric cluster puzzle (place holder)
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