Warplight Wanderer
Project Details:
Level Designer on a team of 7
3D puzzle platformer with emphasize on being a relaxing while engaging experience for players.
Made in Unity for Capstone - September-November 2021
Intent:
Immersive 3d puzzle/platformer built to relax players. In Warplight Wanderer you take control of a Luminaut and explore galaxy Islands using your ship, the Asteria. When discovering islands that have been scattered throughout the galaxy you can dock on them and talk to the Islands Novalings and learn their story. From there players use the ability altering Starbits to complete low-stress puzzles to fix the Warplights to reconnect the inhabitants.
Context and Environment:
In Warplight Wanderer you take control of a Luminaut and explore galaxy Islands using your ship, the Asteria. When discovering islands that have been scattered throughout the galaxy you can dock on them and talk to the Islands Novalings and learn their story. From there players use the ability altering Starbits to complete low-stress puzzles to fix the Warplights to reconnect the inhabitants.
Gameplay:
Player uses Starbits to alter physics in order to complete puzzles. These are comprised of the levels I created with the Starbit system in mind.
Warplight Wanderer’s main mechanic is the Starbit system. These physics altering pickup objects are the centerpiece that the levels were designed around. The 2 Starbits that made it out of concepting were the Ice and Gravity Starbits, which increase friction to allow walking on ice and decrease gravity to allow higher jumping. These heavily influenced design decisions as levels needed to incorporate mechanics while simultaneously not allowing players to sequence break the levels.
Designing for difficulty was a primary concern from the beginning of development. With the gameplay focus on calming and relaxing, the player needed to know how to engage with the world. To approach this I created a tutorial that mixed in some story elements another member of the team created to teach the player in a way that would feel grounded in the world and ensure that they would feel as though they are learning the skills they need to work towards their goal.
The first levels that were created used friction, characterized in game as slippery ice. These ice levels focused on the player using Ice Starbits to enable them to walk up icy slopes that they would otherwise be unable to walk up.
During the development of Warplight Wanderer QA testing was a valuable tool that allowed us to get feedback and see what the state of our game was from the fresh perspective of our testers. One of the key lessons we learned from our testers was that since a key part of our intended experience was to be relaxing, I needed to revise the levels and ensure that it was impossible for the player to make a mistake that took them out of the immersion and to keep them in a flow state while playing though the levels.
