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MITOS
Kikimora Games second game release is a (free) Sokoban-type puzzle game with the core mechanic twist of being able to increase the number of player characters in your squad via the use of cell division.​ In Mitos you take control of a multiplying army of microbes invading a dead street rat, waging a microscopic war of decomposition, feasting on its insides and its inhabitants.
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For this game I did Game Design and Level Design.
Short summary of the core gameplay and mechanics;
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Each player character has an amount of life ranging between 0 and 4. Life is used to perform actions.
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A character with zero life can no longer perform actions.
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The player characters can move, push, attack and split.
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Splitting a character turns it into two. The new characters get half* each of the life of the splitting character.​
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To complete a level the player must end all enemy life on the level before the player characters run out of life.
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*A [2] life character splitting results in two [1] life characters. A character that splits with [1] life results in two [0] life characters.
Building upon a similar foundation, I applied what I learned from the level design process of Wizard's Way Out to the work involved with this game so despite the mechanical twist I managed to start producing levels quite early on which freed up more time for testing, iteration and polish.
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As levels tend to go through a considerable amount of iteration I would draw and playtest the levels on top of my E-Ink tablet, making it quick and easy to improve upon and harden them prior to in-game implementation.
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Something I found particularly useful for the paper playtesting was to represent the player characters using D6 dice. Whenever a player character performed an action I'd make sure that the value on the dice was updated to reflect the current amount of life for the player character. You can see an example of this on the left side of this text.
