Alight is a first-person puzzle game that places you in the shoes of a light-mage trying to conquer a shifting, pitch black labyrinth by solving light-based puzzles, “locking in” pieces of the labyrinth and stopping it from shifting.
Format
Engine
Unity 3D
Team Size
Five
Development Time
Two weeks
ROLES & TASKS
Creative Lead
Coordinating Group Tasks
Conveying Vision
Game Designer
Designing Core Gameplay Mechanics & Puzzles
Building Level Chunks
Technical Designer
Implementing Core Gameplay
Implementing Level Shifting
Implementing Animations
Implementing Post-Processing
Creating In Engine Procedural Animation
Implementing UI
UI Designer
Designing UI
Designing Menus
DESIGN GOALS
Create a unique experience pushing the concept of “light” to an extreme
Explore the idea of a meta-maze
DESIGN DISCUSSION
The core of the game is based on taking the idea of “light” and pushing all of its properties to explore what it can do visually and mechanically. It was this idea that led me to try to experiment with the “pitch black” that most games try to avoid along with things like the different colors of light.
The idea of the meta-maze was inspired by the mythological labyrinth, said to be so confusing that it was often assumed to be shifting. Those good at mazes display the ability to mentally map the space they’re traveling through and reduce the amount of backtracking and trial and error they need to solve the puzzle. By shifting the chunks of the maze around at an interval it takes longer to begin to map each chunk or how those chunks might relate and creates another mental layer of figuring out the rules of how it does or doesn’t shift. Ultimately, once each chunk locks into place as the puzzle at its heart is solved, the maze becomes more and more traditional, ultimately becoming solvable.
STORIES
Our tech artist left the project two days in, bringing our team from five to four, which meant I had to handle any changes to particles from that point on
Our animator was new to games animation and had trouble exporting animations properly for in engine use which meant I had to remove certain keyframes in engine and add others to make sure the animations looked the way she had envisioned them
Our main programmer ran into a wall with the way he was intended to tackle level shifting so we had to get together and devise a new strategy to tackle it which I had a big hand in implementing
