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Just broke my record on longest period of inactivity on this blog - over one year!

 

So, we just started the Big Game Project course, concluding our second year at the programme with a, well, big game project. We are again tasked with writing blog posts as the project progresses, so I will make short, weekly updates from now on.

 

I work with a team currently without name working on the game Symbiosis - a puzzle platformer where the player controls two characters with unique abilities. The two characters, Lumi and Terra, are spirits each possesing two elements - air and fire for Lumi and earth and water for Terra. These elements allow Lumi to cast fire and stand on fragile objects and Terra to climb walls and lift heavy objects, among other things.

 

My role in the project is as designer, making me responsible of reaching the goals we have design-wise, and ensuring the consistency of the game. In practice, I am focusing a great deal on the puzzle aspect of the game as it is arguably the most fundumental part of the gameplay experience.

This means that this week(the second week on the project, and the first in production) has been spent on coming up with ideas for puzzles, and ensuring that most objects and character/player abilities are incorporated in some way. While the puzzle designing will never truly be done until the product is in it's final state, I'm very satisfied with the progress that I've made during this week.

 

 

I started out by making a list of the objects that I regarded as most production efficient - those that I imaged could be used in a lot of diffirent puzzles, but not required a great deal of work(mainly code-wise). I also listed character abilities in a seperate list, and then a list for "superflous" objects - objects that me and the team personally liked but were either hard to create as assets, or were hard to fit into at least a few puzzles.

I think start to sketch as many puzzles as I could, making sure each object and chraracter ability was used at least three times in different puzzles. As of now, I have about 8 puzzle designs that I'm eager to try as soon as possible.

 

Which probably will be next week!