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Project Context
The Dumping Ground: Face Your Fears was a 2D side-scrolling browser game for CBBC, designed to help children face relatable fears in a fun and approachable way.
The game used worries that children could recognise, such as not having the same game as everyone else, having a difficult day, or not wanting to go outside. Those fears were turned into playable scenarios, giving the experience a narrative purpose beyond standard platform-style interaction.
The team consisted of myself as lead developer and one designer who created the assets and levels. We iterated repeatedly across the development cycle to improve the feel, fairness and readability of the levels.
From the beginning, the project was expected to support future level expansions, so the code needed to be flexible enough to slot in new content without heavy rework.
Object-Oriented And ECS Architecture
The game used object-oriented programming alongside an entity-component-system style architecture. This helped keep gameplay behaviour, rendering and level structure modular while supporting reusable systems across levels.
The separation between logic and rendering made the codebase easier to maintain as level content and gameplay behaviours changed during development.
Dynamic Level Loading
The levels changed many times throughout development, so the game needed a dynamic level loader rather than hard-coded scene structure.
Level information was loaded from JSON, including asset placement and behaviour data. This meant levels could be modified, tested and expanded without requiring low-level code changes for every adjustment.
Tiled Map Editor
Tiled was used to create the predefined levels. This was a shift from previous games where Adobe Animate had often been used for level or scene authoring.
Using Tiled gave the designer a visual tool for building levels and exporting structured JSON data. That made iteration quicker and improved collaboration between design and development.
Iterative Design Process
The game went through multiple design and gameplay iterations to make the levels more fun and fair. We worked closely to identify issues with mechanics, level layout and user flow, then adjusted the experience based on how it played rather than treating the first pass as final.
That process helped the final game feel more polished and better suited to its younger audience.
Technical Aspects
- Object-oriented and entity-component-system architecture
- 2D side-scrolling browser gameplay
- Tiled-authored level data exported to JSON
- Dynamic level loading for iterative development and future expansions
- Narrative interaction built around relatable children's worries
- Reusable gameplay structure for additional levels
Challenges
- The game needed to be fun, fair and approachable for a younger CBBC audience.
- Levels changed frequently during development, so level loading had to remain data-driven and flexible.
- The project was planned with future level expansions in mind, so the code needed to support new content with minimal friction.
Contributions
- Led development alongside a designer who created the assets and levels.
- Built the dynamic level loader using JSON data exported from Tiled.
- Structured the game so levels, asset placement and behaviours could be modified without hard-coded changes.
- Worked through multiple gameplay and level-design iterations to improve fun, fairness and readability.
- Implemented the browser game architecture using reusable OOP and ECS-style systems.
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