Break-In Buddies is a playable teaser for a 4-Player party game about breaking into a museum with your friends. It was developed by a team of five as part of our masters studies. The game was developed for the Nintendo Switch, bringing up unique problems with interesting new solutions.

My role in the project was that of the producer and QA, as well as level and system design. Managing a small team with differing goals and ambitions presented an intriguing challenge. Nevertheless, I was able to help define a common project scope and brought the team together to work on it, teaching me many lessons regarding expectations and conflict management.

We took inspiration from real-world museums when working on the level design, adapting the layout of different historic buildings to fit the needs of a vision-based stealth game. The goal was to create an easy to grasp, yet difficult to traverse layout for the players to navigate, with chockepoints adding additional challenge.

Players have to play minigames in order to break locks or steal items, which is an integral part of gameplay. Thus, I was tasked with creating easy to understand, enjoyable minigames akin to games like WarioWare. I focused on making the minigames as simple as possible, with the challenge hailing from the inherent time pressure rather than complex rules or systems. All games are playable with only minimal inputs and are based around reaction time and concentration challenges.