This was a particularly challenging area of the level to design. In this section the player needed to guide a rolling boulder towards a specific spot, using the main mechanic. I greyboxed directly in the Unity engine, using only rudimentary geometric shapes. That meant that the slopes in the beginning were made up of straight ramps, which made the physics-based boulder behave in a particular way. We wanted to go with crafted terrain though, so that meant that me and the environment artist had to work very closely with each other to create the slopes exactly how we wanted them, for the puzzle to make sense and for the boulder to roll like we needed it to. It took a lot of hours and fine tuning, but it was great fun.

In hindsight, I should’ve used Unity’s ProBuilder myself to make the terrain and then hand it off to the environment artist. It wouldn’t have been as fun, but it would have saved us from having two people working on the same thing for a long time.

This is the final area of the game. It was also challenging to create because it needed to test the player’s mastery of the game, as well as giving a sense of grandiose finality and excitement. So the question became; how do you manage that in a puzzle game, without a big boss to fight or cinematic to set the mood. My solution was to create this big mechanism that the player had to activate and manipulate with the main mechanic. The theory was that if the player’s actions influence something very large, it would feel more significant and thrilling. In practice however, it became a little too much like hitting a button and watching the game play itself. The final result felt big but if I could do it again, I would try to give the player more agency/relevance in the puzzle aspect of it.

The area was very big and open, with a lot of points of interest. So, me and the environment artist worked hard trying to make it as readable as possible, with a lot of focus on trying to direct the players' gaze. The final result wasn’t perfect but we were proud of it.

This is an illustration I made in order to communicate the idea of the player being able to tap the jump button on a pillar, right at the moment of landing on it, to get a fully charged power jump instantly, instead of having to hold a button and wait for it. This was implemented to give some more depth to our navigation mechanics, in an attempt to make it more interesting to master it.

I made this animation in the early stages of the project to illustrate to the group the idea of the main mechanic.

This is an animation I made to communicate to the team how the pillars would be affected by boulders. The initial impact takes off a big chunk of health, while the weight of the boulder slowly breaks it afterwards, until it despawns.

This is where a lot of our problems stemmed from. This is an illustration I made that depicted the game’s level. It was filled with ambitious ideas of a semi-open level that would take the player through a grand adventure. A lot of effort was put into the sightlines and how it would all seamlessly fit together, directing the emotions of the player. This created a big problem; It was huge, making it so that the environment artist would need to work extremely hard and efficiently just to populate it, with minimal polish. It also made it so that it took too long for us level designers to deliver the different sections to the environment artist. This made it so we had minimal time to test the sections and fine tune them, making the game play worse than it had to. 

We ended up cutting a lot of it and in the process compromising the ideas of the original plan. In hindsight, we should have made the level much smaller, which would have made it a lot tighter, polished and much easier to iterate upon.