Project Aether
Sophemore Year Student Team Project at DigiPen Institute of Technology
Roles: Creative Director, Narrative Designer, Systems Designer, Level Designer, Gameplay Programmer.
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Tools: Unity, Visual Studios, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Subversion / Tortoise SVN.
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Skills: Movement Systems Design, Combat Systems Design, White-Boxing, Environmental Storytelling, Encounter Design, Environmental Puzzle Design, Bolt Visual Scripting, C#, Playtesting.
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Genre: Top-Down, 2D Action Adventure Game with Puzzle Elements.
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Target Audience: Adventure Game players looking for a thought provoking experience that will test their thinking just as it will their combat skills.
Selling a Fantasy
Project Aether is the first game I sat in the directors chair for. While not much in the vein of explicit storytelling, much effort was put forth across the design to capturing a fantasy of exploring into the unknown, sometimes in confidence, and sometimes without it. See below how I contributed to capturing this fantasy through encounter design, environmental puzzle design, and metroidvania level design.
Game Direction
Reach for the Light
Keep Moving Forward
The main theme behind the game is the pursuit of the light.
My design process always begins by identifying a thesis to guide the design of the work. Going into this game, I wanted to create an experience about not giving up when things become difficult, and continuing to persevere towards the light at the end of tunnel.
From here, the top-down Zelda style of adventure game was identified as being the goal to base our gameplay on, with the specific objective being to build a classic style Zelda dungeon type of experience, with the light literally being found at the end of that tunnel.
The journey won't always be easy, but staying true to your moral compass and following your heart will keep you driven to reach what you're after, and so the mission became designing an experience that brought this emotional journey to fruition. In life, no matter what's in your way, when the going gets tough, never give up. Keep going!
Encounter Design
Creating the Power and Powerless Fantasies
The Powerless Fantasy
Core to the direction from the beginning was wanting introduce a character that played in a way that emphasizes the significance of acquiring items. Narratively, the character was meant to be someone the player could reflect themselves onto, and part of that portrayal comes out through their tools. The player didn't come to the game with anything besides themselves, and so this character in the game does just the same.
So in practice, what we get is a character with no initial way to defend themselves beyond running away from threats. While this idea is different on paper than typical metroidvania style character's like Samus Aran (Metroid) or The Knight (Hollow Knight), it doesn't mean anything without putting the player in situations which give the player a reason to pay attention to how helpless they are.
Before the player character acquires the Halberd, encounters revolve around the player character maintaining distance, thinking ahead, and out smarting the enemies pathing. The space around these encounters are designed to invite the player to maneuver around threats, which is also provides space for luring enemies to places, which was idea we were able to take advantage of in the environmental puzzle design of the game.
The Power Fantasy
Once the player character does eventually acquire the Halberd though, the dynamic of these encounters then flips on its head. The player renavigates a lot of the same rooms, but now with the Halberd, the player is able to take out threats in a single hit, which then recontextualizes these spaces, entirely altering the emotional state of the player despite nothing actually changing about the encounters themselves.
Environmental Puzzle Design
Unlocking the Light
Blocks and Enemies
Much of the gameplay experience focuses on pushing blocks into place to unlock doors to reach the next room.
This gets remixed in a few ways as both the Halberd and the Whip are added to the player character's arsenal, a variation of blocks are added that travel until they hit something in a set direction, and enemies also are able to activate buttons to work towards open doors.
Puzzle Design here works off of a tutorialization principle I learned in school called Evolutions and Expansions. The idea is to introduce new elements first, and then follow that idea up with a twist on how it works, thus being the evolution then being followed up by an expansion.
This idea is present from the very start of the game:
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First, the player is introduced to a door that is locked, and only opens when the player character stands on a pressure plate. The solution to this puzzle is by pushing a block found in the room onto the pressure plate to hold open the door.
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Next, the player is presented with nearly the same puzzle, but the expansion here is that retrieving the block to open the door, also let's an enemy free to chase after the player. This forces the player to move quickly, but what it also does is create multiple opportunities for the player to witness that enemies also activate pressure plates when they stand on top of them, which will be helpful information for the next puzzle.
Why Evolutions and Expansions Matter
The puzzle that follows the two described above makes a bit of a leap in complexity, which for some players was difficult to figure out. The challenge of this puzzle is that there are two pressure plates now needed to activate in order to unlock the door out of the room, but there is only one block in the room to do it. Like the previous puzzle, obtaining the block also lets out an enemy, and that enemy will need to hold down the other pressure plate to allow the player character to get to the next room.
​At the time, to solve for this the room was reworked through several iterations to try and make what needed to occur here clearer to the player, and while testing did improve, it still never really came out fully polished.
In retrospect, the reason for this is that the ideas here aren't clearly tutorialized using a naturel progression of evolutions and expansions. What I would do now with a situation like this is introduce additional puzzles leading up to it which help better introduce the ideas of needing multiple pieces to open a singular door, as well as specific puzzles to introduce the idea of using enemies purposely to open doors (if not cut that part of the puzzle out entirely here as it might be clashing a bit with the powerless fantasy we working to sell during this chunk of the game, so it might actually make more sense much later in the game).
Metroidvania Level Design
The Locks and Keys of World Design
Hitting the Books
Project Aether served as my first attempt at approaching Metroidvania style world design.
The core elements to this level design style I found while working on the project were lock and key progression and creating a level built with back tracking in mind.
​To the right is an early iteration of the level design, and you will notice that both of those elements are absent in it. This early design focused on exploring evolutions and expansion with the puzzle components we had made at the time, at least partially because that was what I had experience doing at the time. As the core aspects of the design direction were missing here, since I did want the Metroidvania elements to still be prevalent in the game, the design needed to change.
This forced me outside of my comfort zone, since I needed to do research on my own to figure out how to make this kind of level design work and feel satisfying. Learning how to research design questions quickly, and be able to learn on my own has made me a better designer, and a more well rounded developer as a whole, since being able to learn on my own has also helped me improve greatly as a programmer, which are skills I've been able to make use of on subsequent projects extensivily.