Aria

An engaging puzzle game aiming to tell its' story through the environment.

The Project

Exploratory puzzle game
Roles of engineer & tech lead
University assignment
Group project by 10 students
Fall 2021

My roles

Leading the tech team and coordinating efforts with the other disciplines.
Programming character controller and physics
Designing the puzzle system

Glide

Time constraints on the world design quashed the idea of a large, explorable world, but the implementation of this (scrapped) mechanic turned out pretty well.

To smoothe out movement over hilly terrain, I projected the character's collider some distance in front of it. This allowed us to start adding upwards momentum before a passable obstacle had actually been encountered, smoothing out the veritcal movement.

Open world aspirations

The initial idea was to let the player gracefully explore an open world through a glide mechanic, similar to that of the game 'Journey'.

Puzzle design

The puzzle system was a lot of fun to create!

We decided that each symbol would represent a set of movements taught when encountering them for the first time. On top of this, we added 'modifiers' that alter how a symbol is interpreted.

To aid with implementing the crafted puzzles into the game, we created prefabs of the different symbols and modifiers.