After the release of AER: Memories of Old in October 2018 me and the team at Forgotten Key spent significant time creating playable game pitches that were shown to potential investors.
I was responsible for everything level design on these projects. Both planning wise and blocking environments in the game engine. With puzzles, I often scripted the first implementation to a playable prototype state and if needed a programmer made a more polished implementation.
Vind
Vind was an open world atmospheric game with focus on exploration, storytelling and fun flowing movement. Mila, the character you play as, could transform into a bird will. It was kind of a spiritual successor to AER with an expanded scope. Mila also had magical abilities that allowed her to manipulate physics objects in different ways. This played a big part in this game’s puzzles. Another big part of the game would consist of the player helping the inhabitants of the game world come together and rebuild a common home, adding aspects of management gameplay to the game loop.
Early on in Vind’s development I was tasked with writing a document detailing Vind Overworld Level Design Guidelines which were used during prototyping and later when building demos. I was also involved in the game design of Vind. This included player abilities and NPC behaviour.
The first demo we created was focused on showing off flight gameplay and getting a feel for how exploring the game world felt. A simple implementation of resource gathering and the ability to construct buildings was also included in the demo along with smaller puzzles.
Later on we built another demo more focused on storytelling with smaller questlines involving NPCs and dialogue but also containing a robuster building system and more fleshed out puzzles. The video below contains a full playthrough of this demo.
Environment dressing was primarily done by me in the Vind demos because of time restraints, where the 3D artists had to work on props and characters.
More information about Vind and two downloadable demos can be found on Itch.io.
Down the Well
In Down The Well you played as a young child named Tay who got trapped in a mysterious and magical underworld called the Well. The game was focused on narrative and exploration with simpler puzzles.
As with Vind I was heavily involved in the game design process of Down the Well, in addition to being responsible for the level design.
Early iterations of the game had a second character, a young faun also trapped in the Well, who followed the player around and could be commanded to do certain tasks. This could be things like interacting with objects in the environment or to move somewhere specific. Most puzzles were based around having two characters who could help each other.
Leading up to building a demo for GDC 2018 the Faun character was scrapped, changing the narrative focus. Now we had these powerful beings living in the Well, each controlling their own domains. The idea was that it was up to the player to choose which of these beings to align with, affecting their influence in the Well and therefore changing the outcome of the game.
One big mechanic that was present in this demo was these magical wooden doors that would be recurring throughout the game. They kind of acted as the game’s fast travel nodes. The doors could be opened and used just as regular doors, leading to the next room, but if you instead used special keys to open them, they would open up leading to a completely different location in the Well, depending on the key used. A design document written by me explaining the door mechanic more in detail.
More information about Down the Well and a downloadable demo can be found on Itch.io.