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"Escape the crumbling underground facility after a failed experiment has gone horribly wrong.."
Detached - First Person Puzzle Adventure
Level Design | Puzzle Design | Narrative
Summary
We wanted to create an immersive experience where players to feel isolated and confused, with a sense of not knowing where they are and what has happened to them.
In order to make players feel immersed we decide to focus on environmental storytelling to carry the narrative as well as only use diegetic UI elements.
Project Breakdown
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9 weeks
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Group Poject
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Created using Unity
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Responsibilities
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Level Design
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Puzzle Design
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Set dressing
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Lighting
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Scrum & presentations
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My Contributions
Level Design
I was responsible for designing the second level. In this level the player will get to use both of the core mechanics in conjunction with each other in order to progress and complete the the puzzle in the pump room.
I also wanted to make sure that the level tells a story to the player as we leaned into environmental storytelling as our means to portray the narrative.
Puzzle Design
I was responsible for the puzzle in level 2.
My goal was to make a puzzle that felt coherent with the environment. I wanted the goal of the puzzle to feel clear while the solution still requiring the player to play around with the core mechanics in order to complete it.
DETACHED was the concept I came up with and pitched for our second group project.
On this project my responsibilites were:
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Lead designer, scrum master & held our sprint/milestone presentations
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Sketching, blocking out and making iterations on the 2nd level.
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Designing and iterating on the main puzzle of the game, looking at player feedback and making changes to help clarify the objective to the players.
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Made the first iteration with populating the level to set the mood and indicate to our artist what the intent of the room was.
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Worked with lighting; setting up lightbakes, tweaking dynamic lights.
Credits
Reflections
Puzzle complexity - A lot of time was spent on planning out the puzzles to give the players adequate information without giving the solution away. My goal was to create puzzles that are easy to complete once the player have the solution figured out, so the main challenge for the player is to figure out the solution through trial and error.
Immersive Experience - Our aim was to create an immersive game with environmental storytelling and diegetic elements as our only ways of portraying the narrative. I'm very proud of what we managed to create but looking back at it I think we could have taken another approach to this considering the time constraint. It takes time to build up a setting that's able to really
With such a limited time span it was challenging to attempt to convey a narrative solely through environmental storytelling and diegetic elements. Our aim was to create an immersive game and it's something that I'm proud of but looking back at it I think we could have taken another approach because of our time constraint.
Open communication - It was great to see the whole team being so engaged in the project, everyone voicing their ideas boosted the iterative process and made our game become so much more than we initially expected.
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