Project Type: Team Project
Length of Project: 3 Months
My Role: Lead Level Designer
Team Size: 6 people
Supported Platforms: PC, MacOS
Engine: Unity
Summery: Handle it lightly is a 2D puzzle platformer that was made in the span of two months. A curse has befallen the land, turning all who enter the sun's rays unprotected to turn to stone. Follow our hero as they descend into an Ancient cave to find a way to end the curse and cure their friends. Solve Light Puzzles and platform through a unique cave system in this Puzzle Platformer!
As lead level designer, I took the idea of an abandoned network of mines, along with the mirrors that allowed for light to be reflected, and used those confines to craft the levels. The way I thought about the levels was that I wanted to keep the feeling that you were going deeper with every level, and even within each level. Thus, all of the levels have a path that skews deeper into the mine.
My Role: Lead Level Designer
Team Size: 6 people
Supported Platforms: PC, MacOS
Engine: Unity
Summery: Handle it lightly is a 2D puzzle platformer that was made in the span of two months. A curse has befallen the land, turning all who enter the sun's rays unprotected to turn to stone. Follow our hero as they descend into an Ancient cave to find a way to end the curse and cure their friends. Solve Light Puzzles and platform through a unique cave system in this Puzzle Platformer!
As lead level designer, I took the idea of an abandoned network of mines, along with the mirrors that allowed for light to be reflected, and used those confines to craft the levels. The way I thought about the levels was that I wanted to keep the feeling that you were going deeper with every level, and even within each level. Thus, all of the levels have a path that skews deeper into the mine.
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My process when designing the levels for this game held the idea of descent as it's cornerstone. Each level I sketched out on notebook paper before I even thought about building them in Unity, as I wanted to have a shape in my head before I started building, taking care to make sure that I kept to the theme as I sketched. As soon as I had a level shape that I liked, I would go into unity and build a bare bones version of the level that I was working on, with enough detail that I could visualize the final product.
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A challenge I faced was the nature of the mirror setup, as there needed to be a logical way to set them up to allow the light to reach the medallion that in turn would open the door. That came down to multiple iterations and many hours of playtesting, each test seeing if the mirror placement not only allowed for the light to reach the end, but also making sure that the player could feasibly align the mirrors in the correct way. This was done first by moving the mirrors around in the editor with the prototype light source, figuring out how the light reflected off of each mirror, and where it would go with each alignment. Once I had a firm grasp on how the light and mirrors interacted, I positioned the medallions and began running tests within the game to see if the player could accurately hit the medallion on a consistent basis.
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