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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
I mainly work as a level designer on Esophaguys and design all the mechanics for the levels I create. Working on this game for the past year now has really helped improve my creative thinking and design decisions when it has come to designing levels. I did some level designing in past projects and didn't really know what I was doing too much at the time but looking back to when I first started designing levels, it's crazy to see how different things are now. Working on Esophaguys has really allowed me to show my creativity in a way I never imagined and it's been an amazing experience. For Esophaguys, I prefer quality over quantity when it comes to designing and developing these levels. I love having a unique theme for my levels that set them a part from each other and designing mechanics for those levels and correspond well with the themes of them. Esophaguys has levels that have floating islands that revolve around grabbing onto giant flies that carry you around and other levels that have you going into an enchanted forest with glowing fireflies and caves with weird creatures and vines you can swing on along with many more strange and mysterious areas on the way!
March 2022 (My first level)
August 2022 (6th level)
Documentation
Along with Level Designing, I have done lots of documentation for the game. We have an entire GDD that I've been keeping updated since the beginning of development for the game. Along with the GDD, I also do beat maps for all of our levels that we currently have in the game and also for our future levels that we plan on implementing into the game. I also have a document that has detailed descriptions and designs for the mechanics in Esophaguys. These are so anyone can better understand how a mechanic in our game works from a technical aspect. I really enjoy making descriptions for these mechanics but I also like to use Photoshop to make images that also help better understand how things work.
Level Beat Maps
GDD Table of Contents
Design and Description for Game Mechanic
Accomplishments and Showcases
Esophaguys has a demo up on Steam and Epic Games with a full release forthcoming
Check out more: https://www.esophaguys.com
Esophaguys has been featured in many showcases/festivals since our team decided to continue development after we all graduated from school. Some of the bigger physical showcases are Day of the Devs in San Diego and LevelUp showcase in Toronto as well as digital festivals like Indie Live Expo, Hand Eye Society's Super Festival and most notably, 2023 OTK's Game Expo which was a live streamed event on Twitch showcasing games to over 150,000 concurrent viewers and most recently, 2023 Dreamhack Atlanta where we had a booth in the Indie section and had hundreds of people playing during the entirety of the event with some players coming back to play a few more times!
Esophaguys on OTK Games Expo (1:46:00)
Players playing Esophaguys at Dreamhack Atlanta
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