Length of Project: 6 Months.
My Role: Lead Level Designer & Narrative Designer
Team Size: 8
Supported Platforms: PC, MacOS
Engine: Unity
Summary: The Lovers is a 2D puzzle game that was made in the span of 6 months. The Lovers is a puzzle game where players interact with drawings and text inside a journal to solve animated and narrative challenges in order to reunite two gods of love.
As the lead designer, I was not only in charge of designing the puzzles, but also integrating the narrative elements of the story into the puzzles, both in form and function.
My process for this was to look at the poetry that had been written for each page, and attempt to find a mechanic or puzzle that would fit the theme of those couplets. This process involved reading through the couplets and thinking about the meaning within the narrative, and then determined a mechanic that could work for it. An example of this can be seen in the very first puzzle, where as the narration explains the gods of the world, the player needs to match their names to the correct god.
My Role: Lead Level Designer & Narrative Designer
Team Size: 8
Supported Platforms: PC, MacOS
Engine: Unity
Summary: The Lovers is a 2D puzzle game that was made in the span of 6 months. The Lovers is a puzzle game where players interact with drawings and text inside a journal to solve animated and narrative challenges in order to reunite two gods of love.
As the lead designer, I was not only in charge of designing the puzzles, but also integrating the narrative elements of the story into the puzzles, both in form and function.
My process for this was to look at the poetry that had been written for each page, and attempt to find a mechanic or puzzle that would fit the theme of those couplets. This process involved reading through the couplets and thinking about the meaning within the narrative, and then determined a mechanic that could work for it. An example of this can be seen in the very first puzzle, where as the narration explains the gods of the world, the player needs to match their names to the correct god.
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Once the mechanics of the puzzle had been decided on, I would go into unity and use some placeholder images to roughly block out what the layout of each page would look like, allowing for the whole team to see what I was thinking, and provide feedback. After receiving feedback, I would go through and make a list of the mechanics I was going to use within the puzzle, and hand it off to the programmers, who I would then work with to make sure that the mechanics were correctly implemented into the current puzzle. Working in consort with the programmers was essential to this process, as they were the ones responsible for making the puzzles I designed work in game.
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As this process went on for multiple puzzles, and less placeholder art was used, I started to focus more on making sure that each page was readable, and that a player could parse what they needed to do from the text, or by interacting with the page. This process also was the time I used to get a clearer idea of how all of the art on the pages fit together, and make sure that the layouts I had in the first place still made sense. Once the main assets were added, it was then time to playtest, making sure that the difficulty of the puzzle was of the right kind, not frustrating, but fun.
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