EMRE FINDIK
In this puzzle platformer, you must carefully plan your moves around the map. Your clones are out to get you and mirror every move you make. Use knives, electricity, and poisonous chemicals to dispose of this science experiment gone wrong.
Clone Combat is a Flash puzzle platformer game that I created with four other students at Cornell from September to December 2015. The game was a semester-long project for the class Analytics-Driven Game Design. Our Beta release received around 20,000 hits in its first week on various Flash game websites, and it was featured on Newgrounds' homepage for ten days as one of the best releases during November 2015.
I contributed to the game in the roles of programmer, level designer and sound designer. Two other programmers and I wrote the game code in ActionScript using Flixel as our game engine. For my sound design work, I mostly used ProTools and Audacity.
GAMEPLAY
The game is set in a remote cloning lab in the desert. The player controls an anthropomorphic figure using their PC keyboard through a series of short levels. Each level presents a puzzle in which the player must kill all of the figure's clones using any available means. The clones are not intelligent, they simply mirror whatever action the figure makes - if the figure were to take a step to the right, they would step to the left.
The player has four actions in the game:
- move left/right
- jump
- throw knife
- step on electric shock button
As stated, each of these actions affect both the figure and the clones. Except for the left/right movement, all actions require all of the characters to be on a platform - that is, no one should be in the air. If this requirement is met, actions could be realized for some of these characters and not all. For example, two clones may have knives and the figure and the other clones may have not, and when the player presses the key to throw a knife, the two clones will throw their knives while the other characters do nothing. Another example is when the player instructs the figure to move to the right but a wall is in its way. The clones will still move to the left while the figure stands still. A key aspect of solving the puzzles is taking advantage of such asymmetries in character actions.
A character can die in three ways: getting hit by a thrown knife, suffering an electric shock and falling into a pot of corrosive chemicals. A puzzle may allow characters to die in one or more of these ways - it is common to find both a knife and a chemical pot in a level. In addition, the clones will kill the main figure if they come into contact. This is a way to both restrict character movement and to strengthen the "player versus clones" theme.
 Knives are deflected at a right angle when they hit slanted walls. Above is one of my earliest level designs on paper in which I utilize this mechanic. While it was originally only meant to serve as an example of a hard level on our design document, a slightly altered version went on to become Level 14 in the final game. The fact that it is the 14th out of 23 levels shows how the team's standards for a hard level increased over time as feedback indicated that players wanted more challenge. |  As Flixel's Tilemap class, which we used to represent level skeletons in the code, takes in integer values for tile/block types, it made sense to save our levels as CSV files once we started expanding the content. Microsoft Excel, with its conditional formatting feature that colored the blocks for us, became a natural choice for a level editor. This is a screenshot of the Excel spreadsheet for one of the levels I designed, which would later become Level 20. |  The start state of Level 20. This level has an unusually high number of clones - there are eight of them. The four clones on the left are positioned to restrict player movement up to a degree rarely encountered in the game. Once the player can navigate these four clones around the main character, the rest of the level is just a matter of navigating the maze-like layout as long as the player is wary of the fact that there is only one knife and one pot to kill all of the clones. |
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 The start state of Level 22, another level I designed. Being one of the most complicated levels, part of the challenge is recognizing that moving to the right half from the left is impossible, and that whoever is at the bottom right corner is stuck there. This also means that a wrong knife throw or a fall could cost the whole level, and such mistakes are likely to happen given many gaps between platforms, many clones to control and slanted walls scattered all over the level. |  The start state of Level 19, one of the levels I designed that utilizes the electric shock and conduction mechanic. The clones, acting as conductors, must stand next to the open wire ends, such as the ones on the left wall, in order to connect the buttons on the floor to the shock stations. Otherwise, the stations will not emit an electric shock even if a button is pressed. |  The start state of Level 15, a level designed by a teammate showcasing the gate-button mechanic. This is also an example of a level that requires timed actions as right after the bottom clone throws the knife, it has to jump over the pot and stand on the white button to open the gate with the white marker and allow the knife to pass through. |