Lost Radiance is a top down, 2D puzzle adventure game inspired by classic Zelda games. In it, you play as a light spirit who sets off on a journey to return the lost light to the land after 100 years of corruption. In the game, you manipulate a light crystal that has the power to harness four classical elements: fire, water, wind, and electricity. Each element interacts with the world in different ways, and it is up to you to figure out each interaction and navigate your way through various themed dungeons.
This project was developed as a final capstone project at Simon Fraser University, where we each used the skills we learned throughout our degree to create a final showcase of our abilities. The goal for this game is to eventually take the concept and flesh it out into a more polished, commercial project.
I was responsible for helping to design the many different puzzle mechanics that would appear in the game. For this game, we wanted our puzzle mechanics to be varied, yet individually intuitive, and fit thematically within our world and with the elements we would work with. Each mechanic needed to have an instant and obvious effect, which we would relay to the art team once each mechanic had been designed.
We would then sort mechanics based on thematic appropriateness for the game's dungeons, and ease of implementation, which let us limit our scope for the amount of time we had over the semester. Then, we picked out the mechanics we felt could have interesting implications when used with other puzzle mechanics.
When settling on the top-down perspective for our game, we needed to figure out a way for the player to be able to use their crystals to interact with objects. We came up with the concept of throwing crystals at objects, much like how Link is able to throw pots in Zelda. However, we had to come up with a way for the player to be able to throw and retrieve the crystal without it being too complicated to learn or tedious.
When experimenting with a straight cardinal directional throw, we found it was hard to be precise when aiming, and it was difficult to tell how far the crystal would travel. Therefore, we settled on giving the player full control of the crystal in all directions, and would give a directional indicator that would tell the player where the crystal was going to land. This would give players a way to throw the crystal a shorter distance if they wanted to.
Originally, the player would also have to physically pick up the crystal to retrieve it, but when testing this internally we found it quite slow and tedious. Eventually, I came up with a mechanic inspired by Mjolnir in the Thor films, or the Leviathan Axe in the new God of War games, and that was to have the player be able to make the crystal return to the player from a distance at the press of a button. When we tested this with players, we found this mechanic to be much easier to get a hang of, and instead of focusing on where their crystals were, they would focus more on the interactions the crystal would have with other puzzle elements.
In the end, after four months of development, we were only able to get a small vertical slice alpha build of our game done in time. This was to be expected, as we plan to expand upon the concept of this game and eventually flesh it out into a full commercial product. However, we will have to address technical issues currently present in our build, as well as re-evaluate certain aspects of the game design, such as the dungeon progression as right now it is quite linear and doesn't fully emulate the more puzzle box style of the Zelda games we are inspired by.