Portal Runner
- Joe Francia
- Dec 26, 2019
- 1 min read
Updated: Nov 23, 2021
A not-so-casual infinite runner with a twist
About
Portal Runner is a new twist on the infinite runner genre. The game screen is divided into
three timelines: top, center, and bottom. When the game begins, only the center timeline is
active, with the other two being blacked out. When the player jumps through a portal, they enter an alternate timeline with its own runner – now the player must control both simultaneously! This can happen again for a max total of 3 simultaneous runners. So long as the player can keep any one of their runners alive, the game will keep going.
My Contributions
• Prototyped & pitched original concept
• Programmed UI, object interactions, particle effects, player controls, save system, leaderboard
management, and dynamic soundtrack
• Implemented all 3rd party API for back-end services
• Designed all level segments
• Arranged music
• Wrote all copy
• Contributed to character and world design
• Set feature schedule & prioritized engineering tasks for team
• Ran company-wide 2-week beta test (with contest prizes!), and analyzed data to determine
feature development
My Process
Portal Runner was both the first time I designed a game that went into production, and the
first time I was given responsibility for managing its development schedule.
The project started off as a prototype I designed while teaching myself Unity. About a year later when I was on the Nickelodeon games team I had the opportunity to pitch it, with the playable demo in hand to show my team how the concept worked. The project was green-lit for a beta prototype, which we used to conduct a company-wide high-score contest. We used the analytics and feedback from that contest to drive our feature set toward an MVP the following year.
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