Meat Portal
Meat portal is a game design document for a first person roguelite revolving around trying to escape an ever-shifting labyrinth of surreal environments, offices, and slaughterhouses. It was inspired by a video by the satirical YouTube channel Clickhole which depicts a couple's reaction to finding a portal in their backyard that generates infinite raw meat.
I entered the project asking myself where the meat from the portal came from, and decided upon a roguelite where every time the player dies, their corpse is harvested for meat and the scraps are ejected through a portal to act as bait.
One key feature of the game is its card based inventory system, in which the player has a deck of cards instead of standard inventory slots, which can be collected, shuffled, and more importantly, fused together to create brand new items.
The game's UI uses a soviet constructionist graphic design style, drawing inspiration from designers like Alexander Rodchenko and Gustav Klutsis
The game's visual style is incredibly varied, mainly drawing from the Liminal Space aesthetic (which consists of eerily empty corridors, hotels, restaurants and malls), “Weirdcore" (An internet aesthetic revolving around surrealism, bright colours, and nostalgia), and industrial settings such as abandoned factories and offices.
The design document contains information for control schemes, UI designs, key game mechanics like procedural generation and item fusion, a list of level ideas, the game;s story and examples for items, enemies and bosses.
The design document, which contains image credits, is available to view below:
The game's main HUD
The game's item fusion UI
