Mirror Me

​Mirror Me was a final-year university collaborative project between myself and Daniel Bou-Antoun. The game took over a year and started as a simple idea: "What if you had to kill your mirror copy”. 

The idea behind this was that the player would have to use the mirrored character to traverse the level, before getting rid of their mirror copy so they could transport themselves to the mirror world, which would be done through a mirror object at the end of each level.

The project was done in two stages a prototype which can be seen in the Games scrapbook and this final version. The final version had a few major changes from the original prototype:

Firstly, the most major change is that the mirror object was removed to make it easier for players to understand that they can move anywhere
in the level, once the mirrored player is gone. This was done as players gave feedback saying, that they didn’t know they had to kill the mirrored copy, or that they could move across to the mirrored world. However, with this change, I believe we lost some of that Mirrored feel, as not having a barrier makes the world feel very open and makes levels feel singular instead of having a clear divide between the copies as before.

​Secondly, the mirrored character was blacked out and given particle effects to make the character seem more ethereal and give it fewer features that the players might attach themselves to. As a few players stated they would get attached to the mirrored copy and would want to save it instead of killing it. Furthermore, to make the character even more disposable, we made it so that the player would bounce off this character, with a sound effect to give the player auditory feedback that this character was stopping progression and also making the shadow character slightly more annoying/ less likeable. 

Another major change that we did was to make it possible to stand on top of the “mirror” at certain levels, allowing for a greater range of levels and gameplay types, including ones where the player would be above or below their mirror copy. 

With this change, we managed to design my favourite level in Mirror Me. In this level players would have to look up to walk through a maze which is invisible on the players’ side of the mirror, this made the game feel like a top-down game in which players would sometimes forget which way was really up, giving a unique challenge to the game.

Among those major changes, there were also minor changes added such as effects on objects which are visible only on one side, a key to progress onto other levels and voice prompts which would hint at the challenge of the level.