My Role: Designer, Programmer, 3D Artist
Game ideation
Prototyping the game
Designing all the game features
Creating a system to manage the levels
Art of the game, 3D and 2D using Blender, PS, and AI
Genre: Puzzle game
Engine: Unity
Platform: PC (Itch.io)
Team Size: 1 Person
Duration of Project: 6 months
Rolling Realms is a SOLO DEV PROJECT, I worked on it in my final year of Event Horizon School as my final personal project, this served to increase my skills as a game developer by better understanding how Unity 3D works, I designed and implementing all aspects of the game.
This game challenges players to control a cube, traverse levels, and solve puzzles to reach the end of the path.
While I was thinking about what to do for my personal project for the last year at Event Horizon, I was playing D&D with my friends and something happened, I rolled a die (d6) and during its rotation, it matched the face with another die and they moved together for a while, this strange but beautiful interaction made me think of a game, and I decided to prototype it.
Taking Bloxorz and Rubek as the main references for the game mechanics, I started prototyping the game, thinking about how to do it, and keeping in mind the 3 Cs.
CHARACTER
ROLL OF THE CUBE: looking at the references the cube moves on a grid, why do they do so? and it's useful for my game?
Both games use an important aspect which is interaction with elements in the environment, as I wanted to do, so the best idea for a puzzle game that has this kind of interaction is to use a DETERMINISTIC structure, which allows the player to have more easily determine next moves, plus the fact that both the cube and the rectangle are great to use on a square grid. Movement on a grid was the most correct idea for me
CUBE MATCH: This mechanic is the most important one, all the game is based on this mechanic, and it became a pillar of the project, but how to design it?
At the beginning of the project, the cube was only colored, I will later understand that this was an error, and basically the cube you can control if it is in a cell adjacent to the element you want to interact with and the faces that are in contact are the same color, the interaction begins.
ROLL THE RECTANGLE: Now it was time to figure out how to do the mechanics that had mainly struck me when I had the idea, to join the two cubes and make them move together, but how to do that?
Simple I reversed the mechanics of Bloxorz, where you start as a rectangle and can be split into two cubes, I changed from two cubes to a rectangle.
SEE THE HIDDEN FACES: Now that I have the ability to move around and finish a level, another major problem has emerged: how can the player figure out the hidden faces?
The first idea was to understand the design of a cube, how it is drawn and how the faces are placed.
The opposite faces of a cube always have the number 7 as the sum, so I put the number on the faces, this was a start but it wasn't enough for the player to understand in different cases. So why not let the player see the hidden faces directly to more easily plan how to solve the puzzle?
CAMERA & CONTROLS
After a short period of development, I realized that the isometric camera I had up to that point was not working; the directions associated with the WASD keys were not clear.
After some research, I came up with the idea of using the trimetric view, a type of camera that can help players better understand the direction of the different motion vectors.
After this modification, I set up a playtest and saw that it worked correctly, almost 95 percent of people clearly understood the direction of movement, but not fully satisfied with the result I added a tutorial in the first level to avoid any doubt.
Once the main mechanics of the game were defined, I had to add side mechanics, to make the game more compelling as you progressed through the levels, and I came up with several tiles power
TILES EFFECTS
Each world introduces a new effect that the player understands during the first level of each world and has to master it during the game.
ROTATION TILE: rotates the cube or rectangle if the player matches the right faces.
being the match of the faces an important element of the game, why don't change them when you need it, using the tail that rotates of 180°
PLATFORM TILE: makes the cube or rectangle move if the player matches the right faces.
I needed a tool for the player to reach a sort of checkpoint, to divide the level into two or more parts, and to use this element to move through the level, without changing the rotation of the player.
BREAKABLE TILE: when the player gets out of the tile it falls down.
This is the strangest mechanic in the game because it is different from all the others, it does not require the face match to work, which makes this mechanic slightly step out of the pillar I had defined, however, I still wanted to try it, and it actually made the game more interesting now the player can remove variables from the calculation when planning the level, giving the player more agency, making the levels also more attractive
LEVEL MODIFIER BUTTON: if the player matches the right faces, change the level composition.
Looking at the breakable tile, I needed a similar mechanic that could take the variables out of the calculation, but keep the mechanics closer to the pillars, so the idea of a button that would change the level, dividing the levels into several parts and giving the player a possible mid-game goal was born.
My goal for this project was to create at least 20 levels, but to accomplish this I needed a system and method of creation that would keep the levels interesting and in line with the theories of Game Flow and Scaffolding, allowing the player to acquire skills and strategies as they progressed, avoiding too steep a learning curve and trying to keep the player in the flow zone.
I created a system using google sheet, which assigns each level a level modifier, giving each item a modifier value based on their difficulty or importance in the levels.
This system allowed me to create 30 levels, 10+ than I thought, creating them quickly as well.
The idea of each world is that:
The first level is an introduction to the new mechanics
From the second to the fifth level the player understands well how to use the new mechanics, even combining it with an “older” one, with more or less complicated levels.
Once awareness of the mechanics is obtained one must prove his or her skill by tackling the last level, which is much more difficult than the others.
The art of the game was a challenging part for me, not only for the 3D part but also for the UI concept and the background of each level, I realized the importance of colors in the game. The main references for the art were: Monument Valley and Gambit Shifter.
One problem was the creation of the particle systems for each level, which had to be themed to the environment and maintain the right atmosphere while avoiding distracting the player from the game.
Another major problem was the color of the cubes:
How can the player recognize the player cube and the cube that can be attacked?
I changed the opacity of the two cubes, making the player's cube brighter than the other, so the player can more easily tell the differences, and I also created an animation for the player's cube as it enters each level.
In conclusion Rolling Realms was one of the most important projects I did during my studies, it taught me a lot about how to develop a game, how to approach game development on my own but and also about the difficulties one can encounter as a programmer and as a artist.