Ejen Ali Emergency

My Internship at Common Extract

Ejen Ali: Emergency was the very first project I get to be involved in. Originally it was a prototype from a game jam hosted by Media Prima, which I wasn’t being involved in.

The Planning

When I started my internship with Common Extract, I was tasked to brainstorm with more idea that can be incorporated into the game. At that time, Media Prima had no solid idea on how each characters would work yet. Some of the earlier idea includes that the main protagonist, Ali, would be using a projectile weapon, and his dash boots could make him jump over a great height. These can be seen on the very early teaser released.

But this also means that I also get to decide what abilities would be packaged for the characters. I mainly refered all the teasers being released when coming up with the ideas, especially when Media Prima eventually nailed down their direction.

Mission: Neonimus

With the mechanics decided, I started to do paper-prototyping while the senior programmer was still working on coding those mechanics. We also decided that we would create a new faceless anonymous character to act as the main antagonist of the game. I would also be tasked to write the dialogs.

I begun to design the levels within Unity once the tiling tools are completed. I immediately noticed that the design on paper does not translate very well into the game world, due to miscalculated dimensions. Those initial few levels aren’t looking too great, but they worked well after some adjustment.

With these experience, I was able to perform paper-prototyping with a better translation to the game world. Paper-prototyping is generally more forgiving, and easier for this title since the map tiles and often props are snapped to the grid.

Eventually, I finished my internship. But no the project. Hence I worked on a short term contract basis to deliver the remaining levels.

These levels would be the levels in Mission Neonimus.

P.S. The character Neonimus would eventually be adopted into the series as an anonymous hacker.

Full Time Game Designer

In 2018, I was being approached by Rob. He invited me to join the company again to be a full time Game Designer, and one of the project that I immediately assigned to was, you guessed it, Ejen Ali: Emergency again.

Mission: Azurium

This time, Ejen Rizwan would be included as the new playable character. I was tasked to design another set of levels for it, and soon after, we would get a new designer to help out.

One of our most most most proudest levels would be Level 16, 17 and 19. These 3 levels share a central area that are common to all 3 levels, but each with their own extension(s), and each character begins / ends at different extension while going through the central area.

The interesting part is that, Ali, Rizwan, and Alicia would be navigating throughout the very same central area using different path, each using their own specialty to navigate through the puzzle and action filled sections.

Other Missions

Other than that, we were also tasked to design other Missions, such as:

• Event missions, such as:
  • Merdeka Missionss
  • Raya Missions
  • Chinese New Year Mission
• Ranked Mission, with 4 new characters, namely:
  • Roza
  • Rudy
  • Khai
  • and Mika
• Branded Mission such as the Desaru Mission
• And the most unique of all, Ejen Ali the Movie Mission…

… where we were only as many details as shown in trailer, and ended up with a series pretty exciting level taking place inside a VIP airplane. This level featured Ali, Alicia and Bakar, as shown in the trailer. We weren’t able to find a way to design a section for Comot the cat without being presented as a cat rediculing the new enemies which are much more stronger.