PLATFORM
Windows
GAME ENGINE
Godot
ROLE
Game Design, Level Design, QA
PROJECT LENGTH
7 months
MY CONTRIBUTION
- Game Design (every team member) – defining mechanics and systems (kind of interactable platforms, melody creation etc.)
- Creating Tutorial for the game
- Designing levels and background (tiles for scene)
- Playtesting of existing levels
The Concept
Play as Dee, a character awakened to an endless night to traverse an enchanted landscape in search of little pieces of the moon. Each piece collected, summons the Sun and enhances Dee's musical capabilities.
Innovative Musical Puzzles:
Solve intricate puzzles by listening to the frequencies of musical objects and playing matching tunes on your magical instrument to interact with your surroundings.
Atmospheric Exploration: Immerse yourself in a beautifully hand-crafted world with mystery and minimalistic storytelling.
Play with Soundscapes:
Enjoy the sounds of your solutions. Create your own melodies with an increasing number of notes to play with.
Features
- A unique music based mechanic that lets music notes influence objects within the environment
- Challenging Puzzle design, that lets players experiment with the creation of melodies
- Beautiful pixel-art
- A serene soundtrack
Design Pillars
We strive to create a thoughtful, reflective and challenging experience. Our gameplay design is focused on creating engagement with deep systems through simple interactions.
Musical Engagement
- Listening to notes is an integral part of our experience. We want players to engage with listening and identifying notes.
- Players need to be aware of their interactions in musical terms – they need to understand the rhythms of musical objects, and how their own inputs fit into the rhythmic structure of the level. Its a bad sign if you can complete a level without paying attention to the rhythm (after the initial levels).
Thoughtful Experience
- Each level is crafted to provide a thoughtful experience. The melody evolves and grows with the player's progress through the game.
- Incentivize engagement with the elements of the game which can produce contemplation
- Emphasize the importance of each idea and emotion in the game
Dynamic World
- Everything should be tied together!
- Player’s musical input should be met with an appropriate response. The input of music should feel alive and meaningful in the game world.
- As players progress, they'll notice how the music dynamically changes, reflecting their journey musically and narratively.
The player should feel that
they are on a journey
- Each area of the game is designed to have its own unique feel, achieved through a combination of level design, musical themes, and visual elements.
- Players will distinguish different areas not only visually but also through their distinct soundscapes, enhancing the sense of musical diversity and meaningful progression.
Challenges
The first challenge was to define exactly how the music mechanic would work. We had a lot of discussions regarding that, for instance regarding how many strings we would have, which tones and what kind of music objects we want to have – how they should react when the right note was hit and where the journey of the player should lead to.
Another challenge was to
create levels that have the right difficulty curve. It was a lot of trial and error to create levels that would be fun, while having a progressive and fitting difficulty and meanwhile ideally creates a harmonic melody or even gives players the possibility for multiple solutions.
Also it was for all of us the first time of using Godot, it is not extremely different from Unity in some ways, but still for instance the way of programming (signal logic and different programming language) and some shenanigans like quickly lost data paths became obstacles on the way.