PETAL
Platform: Windows PC
Engine: Unity
Language: C#
Tools Used: Unity Development Kit, Aseprite, Ableton Live Lite
Duration: Ongoing (2023 --> Present)
Team Size: 11
Project Design Goals:
- Create a well-paced 2D puzzle game with diverse and engaging mechanical interactions
- Build a game that reflects its central theme of harmony in every facet of its creation.
- Demonstrate my skills as a creative lead, level/puzzle/systems designer.
Roles: Creative Lead, Systems Design, Level Design, Puzzle Design, Music Composer, Artist Support, Stand-Up/Sprint Leader, Minutes Keeper
PETAL is a 2D co-op puzzle platformer about a pair of newly evolved plant lifeforms discovering an overgrown seed vault and the new life that tends to it. Two players must harmonise with each other and the interactive environment in order to navigate the interconnected facility, and find what awaits them in the outside world.
This third year university project is currently underway! The game centres around a theme of harmony, which is reflected not only in the setting, where plants and machine life coexist, but also in the level design, narrative, audio, etcetera. Gameplay is structured around the interactive environment that players will engage with and manipulate together in order to progress through the vault.
Available Here: https://this-way-up.itch.io/petal
As the creative lead on PETAL, I am focused on communicating with the different specialisms on the team and ensuring that the overall game is building towards our desired core experience.
I have also served to mediate creative disputes and decision-making on the team. In discussions where a clear outcome cannot be made, my role is to evaluate which choice best suits the vision of the game, and steer the team towards our desired end result.
On top of being creative lead, I function as the lead level and puzzle designer on the project. During the prototyping phase, my design process consisted of creating blueprints of sections of the level, plotting out their mechanics and relevant objects. After the plan has been made, I recreate the blueprint in-engine, where it then undergoes internal and external playtesting. I use playtesting methods such as 'Think Aloud' and questionnaires to help collect data and feedback, which I then use to inform my iterative level design process.
In later versions of the game, where I was developing more finalised puzzles, it was also my responsibility to lay out the interconnected level space and fully decorate it, ensuring puzzles and interactive elements were clearly communicated and signposted while also selling the narrative function and setting of the game.
At the beginning of the project, I helped steer the direction of the game with work as a systems designer, planning out each core puzzle mechanics we were looking to implement for the project. The goal was to create a set of systems and mechanics that had a range of interactions with one another, to allow for a diverse amount of systemic puzzles. To do this, I created an 'interaction matrix' of puzzle mechanics and interactive objects to help define the specifics of how different objects combine and play off each other. It proved to be an invaluable tool for mechanic prototyping and level design.
Designing for Petal has consisted of lots of interesting challenges that I've loved tackling. One of the most interesting questions I had to answer was pertaining to the game's Metroidvania-inspired level design. Most games with interconnected maps and levels to explore are decidedly single player affairs, so how do you adapt this for two players exploring together? How do you incentivise sticking together and collaborating, not wandering off apart from one another? These were the core questions that informed a lot of Petal's level design.
The solution I landed on was to making traversal in Petal a decidedly two-person task. To get just about anywhere in the seed vault, players must work together in order to open the way forward or trace the path back. One system I pitched that was key to this style of design was the ability for players to pick up and throw one another. This allowed for higher ledges that one player couldn't reach on their own - they would need the help of their partner to get thrown up there, then bringing down a lift or opening a door so that the two players could carry on together.
As creative lead, I helped the team identify the core player experience that we wanted every facet of Petal to elicit: harmony. We wanted players to feel a great sense of kinship and joyful collaboration, both with their co-op partner, and with the environment they were exploration. This is why the game's setting revolves around the relationship between plants and machinery, two forms of life that now work together to allow the players to explore the facility. This is also why mechanics like the player throws were introduced, as it requires players to 'harmonise' and work together in order to progress.
One other key way that I sought to emphasise the theme of harmony was, fittingly, through the game's audio. I pitched to the team an Adaptive Audio System (or AAS), which would adaptively weave instrumental layers of music in and out to perfectly match the current events happening on screen. For example, if the players were pushing a heavy object, a booming, echoey layer of percussion would be introduced to sell the weight of that action, or if an electronic object was being powered, a low hum of a synth would underpin composition. The AAS means that, as the players cooperated by solving puzzles and exploring, they are literally harmonising with one another by creating a piece of music that is entirely unique to the situation!
I worked as composer on Petal, producing all of the music for the game and its AAS, as well as for external media such as the trailer.
Petal contains a lot of work I'm proud of, such as its systemic web of puzzle mechanics and its focus on one core player experience across each discipline behind the game's development. I believe I have contributed very meaningfully to the game and its direction as creative lead, and I'm excited to continue my work on the game together with the wonderful team at This Way Up, with the ultimate goal of releasing the completed game within the next couple years.
The first trailer for Petal can be viewed here, edited and composed for by myself!
