Hey! My name is Nik and I’m a guy behind art, SFX and core game mechanics of Don’t Crawl. In case you haven’t played the game yet, it’s a multiplayer competitive platformer. One player controls the hero while the others take control of the monsters in attempts to kill the hero and take their place.

Don’t Crawl is a game about monsters. They are, obviously, what makes the game fun. I planned them to be very unique, balanced and easy to control. Initially, I was going for a bird (flies in a straight line and drops eggs), a hedghog (can’t jump, but can’t be killed by jumping on it) and a frog (moves via jumping only). But lately I removed both the frog and the hedghog – the last one was too primitive, and I was afraid that the frog would have too much movement freedom. So I went for a slime that makes the ground stickier while moving (it combos well with other monsters and traps) and for a demon who is immune to stomp damage and can dash upwards.
Here came a problem of monsters’ interactions. Shall eggs kill other birds? What happens if demon lands on spikes? How about laser traps? I didn’t have time to draw demon death animations (he looks almost like the player, so he is expected to leave a corpse) and thus protected him from spikes and eggs. It definitely made the demon quite unexpectable and unbalanced, but well, I didn’t have that many options…
Another huge problem I faced was level design. The point was to make the play session fun both for the hero and the monsters. Here are a few examples of how I tried to achieve this:

And this is my attempt to implement “built-in tutorial”. I wanted to make sure the player knows how to play the game. That’s why I tried to teach him level-design-wise:

And these are the tricks I used to eliminate “camping spots”:

Well, that’s it. Thanks for listening! Oh, and how about giving Don’t Crawl a try?