Our light is an isometric puzzle game that plays into the theme of sharing your light. Though the world may be darkened and corrupted by loneliness, a simple act of kindness can bring light to a gloomy world. As you face the challenges and puzzles of life, remember that kindness can be returned.
Playable on Itch.io. Our Light was a game I worked on while at the University of Utah in my Alternative Game Development class. This project lasted one full semester, about four months. The goal of this project was to continue developing skills working on full projects and on a team while also developing skills working on a project that had an alternative theme. The alternative part of our game was our underlying message of kindness overcoming loneliness and the darkness of life. This project had a total of five people on the team. I worked as both a designer and an artist on that team.
Goals
● Develop skills working on a team
● Learn the Unity Engine
● Develop an alternative puzzle game with:
○ A core underlying theme of battling loneliness
through kindness
○ Engaging gameplay around our light giving
mechanic
○ Gameplay that encourages player choice with
multiple routes
Player Design
For this project the first thing we knew was the message we wanted to deliver with our game. I wanted the gameplay to reflect our message of spreading kindness to overcome loneliness. To do this we centered our gameplay around the core mechanic of sharing light. Our player had a lamp that they can turn on and off to light their way and the light could be shined on different interactables to create different effects. The player only had so much light however and would have to choose where to spend their light until they could make it to a checkpoint. Checkpoints were designed as lamp posts we had set up which, when you walked underneath, would refill your light.
Gameplay Design
When we started working on this game we wanted to have two or three different interactables for the player's light to be used on. We then would add NPCs around the map that the player could interact with and have conversations with them. Then the player would be able to share their light with them, representing being kind. This would use a large amount of light however the NPC would then travel with the player and would help with particular interactables. Each NPC would be associated with a particular interactable and would be able to activate them without the use of any light.
We quickly realized that we were not going to have enough time to develop multiple interactables or NPCs so we down scoped to only having one of each. Our one interactable were our crystals that created light bridges, and our one NPC was a lost boy who would build bridges with his toys. Having only one unfortunately made it harder to create interesting or engaging puzzles however we tried to make them more interesting through our level design.
During playtesting our first major issue was that player's found the game far too difficult when the NPC was not found and they found the game far too easy when the NPC was found. The NPC allowing for unlimited bridges to be built made the game too simple and not engaging. To attempt to resolve this we put a limit on how many bridges the NPC would help you build however the bridges length did not matter. This made your choice of where to use the NPC more meaningful and also made the game still have challenge even after the NPC was helped.
Towards the end of our project we managed to have a little bit of extra time and then brought back one more interactable to implement into our game. We had introduced fog into the level of our game and had developed a shimmering version of the fog that the player could clear with their light. Along with this fog we introduced NPCs around the map that were unfriendly and could not be interacted with except for a short dialogue. We felt that this would create the environment of feeling lonely and isolated until one finds a friendly character.
UI Design
This game was my first real time designing a larger UI. We developed many different options for the pause menus and the in game UI. One of the issues we had early on in playtesting was that players didn't understand how much light they had remaining so I designed different UI pieces to show this resource and how much light you still had. We also had to design textboxes and icons for NPCs and even different pop-us to explain inputs to the player.
Level Design
Level design for this game was interesting for me because it was my first time working on an isometric game. The new camera angle makes level design very different as you have to keep in mind when objects would block the player's view. Our level was sort of a haunted town so we had lots of buildings and when laying them out I needed to make sure that the player wouldn't get caught behind them and not know where they are. I also needed to make sure that as the player walked through the level the camera wasn't blocked by any buildings in lower areas.
The other large part of the level design for this game was the layout of the puzzles. Our puzzles were essentially mazes where the player had to build bridges to find their way across islands to reach new destinations. Designing these puzzles wasn't actually done by me for the most part but our team play tested them together and helped to try to provide input on balance of resource requirements, layouts of bridges, and also placements of things like checkpoints and NPCs.
I did a lot of playtesting for this game and watched a lot of people playtest our game and found many different bugs on the map, soft locks, and ways to break collision to get to areas outside of the playable space. I then would go in and resolve these issues with some quick changes to collisions and obstacles. We also found that our level felt strange floating without any kind of background so we developed some fog to place in the background and around the map to express boundaries to the player. We also used a version of this fog for a new interactable and obstacle in our level which was then integrated into our puzzles and our level layout.
Art
For this project I worked on art as well as design. I modeled and textured the NPC characters and I also modeled and textured several environment assets.