ANT GAME: Title Pending
ANT GAME: Title Pending is an adventure puzzle game where you're an ant who's lost its colony. You must venture out into the depths of the garden where you'll face all sorts of puzzles and strange characters.
Roles: Game/Level/Puzzle Designer
Studio: Team BugFix
Development Time: 8 Months
Engine: Unity
Contributions
Ant Game was originally scoped for a team of 13 people, however, shortly into production we were faced with a variety of constraints that limited our resources as we were often left with only a few people working on the project at a time. As a designer, I was stretched across a broad range of specialisms ranging from level design, puzzle design, mechanics design and narrative design. Over the duration of the project, I learnt how to block-out levels, write up design documents, and lead team meetings, I also took up the role of design leader towards the end of the production.
Level and Puzzle Design
Ant Game's Level and puzzle design came hand in hand and were very much designed symbiotically. Each of the three designers would take the creative lead on one of the levels but the production of the levels was still a team effort between all the designers.
For me, the hardest challenge was making creative use of the ant's few mechanics. A wall climbing ability and a pickup and throwing ability were the only two major mechanics at our disposal and so I found myself drawing inspiration from the setting the ant was placed in. The first setting, which would also house the tutorial... was the bin level.
Design Philosophy:
The bin is an enclosed space in order to create a sense of safety for the player, closed off from the scary outside world. Within the bin, the player is free to learn the mechanics and the controls before venturing forward into the unknown. In order to leave the bin, the player must understand the mechanics to complete the puzzle.
Upon the puzzle's completion, the player sees the bright light of the outside world beaming through the uncovered door.
Early block-out of the bin level.
A fundamental rule for the puzzles was that they are all physics-based in their solutions. A puzzle utilising a seesaw-catapult was one of the first puzzles that came to mind when creating physics-based puzzles. The real creative challenge was how to make it eccentric and unique to fit the narrative, and I achieved this by introducing Slade, the only snail to live life in the fast lane.
Tutorial Puzzle : Snail seesaw-catapult!
My goal for the bin level was to introduce and demonstrate how the mechanics worked to the player. These were the throwing mechanic and the wall-climbing mechanic. I achieved this by telegraphing solutions through weaknesses in the environment and making use of the cinematic camera when talking to Slade the snail.
The first throwing puzzle is completed by picking up and throwing the berries at the cracked wall. It was important to show the player that cracks in the environment are potential puzzle solutions as later in the game the boss fight level also makes use of cracked pillars.
Slade the snail explaining wall climbing. Not only does introducing Slade introduce the player to the wonderful wackiness of the world, but shows that characters are interactable and in this case helpful towards solving the puzzle.
Tree Level
I also blocked out the tree level which was the home of Lord Frogerson, the quest giver. Up to this point, the ant has traversed only hazardous environments, and just like the bin level, I wanted this place to feel enclosed and cosy where the tempo of the gameplay is slower and more relaxing. I did this because beyond this point is the juxtaposition of the very unforgiving, fast-paced boss level.
The direct line to the frog is blocked by water, which has already been established as dangerous in previous levels. Simple firefly lights and arches help direct the player up and around the tree.
Post-Mortem / Reflection
I am immensely proud of the work I did for this project. Before I started I had little to no experience with Unity and it's block-out tools and by the end of production, I was confidently designing, pitching, and developing my ideas to present to the team. In hindsight, there were several decisions and warning signs early on in production which if recognized and addressed sooner, would have resulted in a more polished build. Leaving this project I've become a much more confident team member and therefore more proactive in addressing warning signs in production as well as a far more capable and adaptable designer being able to fill in for a number of design roles.
What Went Well
Towards the second half of the project, we as a team moved into better use of agile practices' and I as an individual gained a lot of confidence in working within a team.
The world-building of the ant game is presented really clearly. The bright visuals and eccentric characters crammed into the micro-world of a garden were shown off really well within the game. The narrative, music, themes, and gameplay all blended well together and could be easily built upon if development continued.
The levels challenge the player to think creatively with the mechanics at their disposal. We demonstrated a wide variety of puzzles with limited mechanics at our disposal.
What Could Have Been Improved
The original art style we decided upon was realistic, however very quickly due to the tightness of resources we had a large backlog of art assets waiting to be created. If we recognized earlier the bottlenecks created by pushing for a realistic art style, we could have developed a faster turnout rate between block-out and decorated levels. I was able to create low-poly art assets through block-out tools alone which we could have capitalised on if we opted for a low-poly art style. Looking back, this issue originates from poor communication between team members and not speaking up when noticing red flags in production efficiency.
Inclusion of more mechanics. We had prototyped a skateboarding/ sliding mechanic, as well as a gliding mechanic. Both had levels blocked out, however, were never fully produced and implemented into the final build due to time constraints. If these mechanics were implemented to be used at our disposal, the level created from them would have added greatly to the gameplay experiance.
Explore the world yourself by visiting the Itch page!!
