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Aurora Olsson
Game Designer
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Heliotrope
Singleplayer Puzzle Platformer
Main Role: Level Designer & Puzzle Designer
Platform: PS4
Duration: 9 Weeks
Engine: Unity
The player has the ability to conjure magical crystal pillars that grow out from the environment.
These pillars act as multipurpose platforms that can help the player bypass traps, navigate the environment and outsmart puzzles.
Gameplay Design
I pitched Heliotrope with the original idea to create an artful platformer game surrounded by one core mechanic. The core mechanic stayed intact, but the game in of itself went through lots of iterations!
The first thought was to have combat based upon the core mechanic, but in the end, we decided to change it to puzzles instead, which was incredile fun to design!
Level Design
My primary task was the level design. I had a lot of fun experimenting with different types of challenges and level structures.
Since the game started out as a combat-platformer and ended up as a puzzle-platformer, I had the pleasure of creating level design for both versions of the game. It sure was a challenge that I really enjoyed.
The graybox version of a puzzle
The final artpass
Puzzle Design
The puzzle designing was my personal favorite throughout this project. I got to challenge my creativity and problem-solving ability which was a great learning experience. I got to combine the movable cubes that you can put pillars on (that we ended up calling pillarable cubes) with the four different trap tools (the swinging ax, the poison mist, the rolling boulders, and the turrets). We also added a gate that can be smashed open with a horizontal pillar or a boulder.
I am very satisfied with the puzzles I designed and with some more time, the entire game as well as the puzzle element had great potential.
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