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- Dioravity -

Trailer by Lucrezia Romeo, Lead Game Artist & Environment Artist on the project

Music by Geoffroy Carrot, Sound Designer & Composer on the project

Team Size : 7

Role : Gameplay Programmer

Engine : Unity

Time : Feb. - June 2022 (4 months)

See here for The Rookie's nomination

Main Problems

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Facilitating content creation

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Rationalizing the Game's Design

  • We wanted the core experience of this game to heavily rely on beautifully looking dioramas, each one with its unique theme and gameplay. That meant asset reuse was not an option and each puzzle had to come up with a fresh approach to the core mechanic. Such tailor-made design proved to be a big challenge for content creation, as each level required a lot of time to be built.

  • Though this game didn't have a lot of gameplay elements (around 12), it still required to build a common design language and more precisely a way to document every puzzle in a rational way.

And their solutions

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The Win Condition System

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Game Mechanics keywording

  • I quickly realised that, no matter how different the various puzzles were on the surface, it was always possible to abstract them out to a binary state - the puzzle was either won or not won - without the need of tracking down near win states. This allowed me to build a Win Condition System that could handle, with minor tweaks, any kind of puzzle from the designers.

  • To solve this problem, I took inspiration from the design framework I was building on my last personal project (see Amarthëna) and adapted it for our specific needs. Thus, instead of a very detailed database of mechanics, we worked with type-based keywords. This allowed us to rationalize the puzzles creation while keeping enough freedom on the design side.

My Social improvements

  • Participate in the estimation of task duration

  • Organise key merging of work before important milestones by communicating with all team members

My Technical improvements

  • Act as the technical reference for any Art or Design-related question

  • Find a way to abstract out very specific requirements

My Creative improvements

  • Build a common design language for quick implementation while avoiding too much creative restrictions

  • Support design team to identify the game experience and core gameplay mechanics

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