cubealingus | andreasnilssongamedev.com

Project Details

Roles: Gameplay Designer, Level Designer

Time: 4 Weeks

Team Size: 10

Tools: Unreal Engine, Github, Miro

Description

Cube'a'lingus is a FPS puzzle game inspired by the painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights". This game is based of on the hell part of the painting. As the player you are an imp in hell who wish to lead a better existance, therfore you try to escape this hell you reside in. To do so you must overcome many hardhitting puzzles and dangerous surroundings.

My Part

During the project I would be one of the people responsible for designing the core loop of the game as well as the different sides of the cube which is a main mechanic in the game and general level design.

Gameplay Loop

Traverse and enter the puzzle room

Observe and figure out the goal.

Search and find all the puzzle piecies and prepare

Experiment and solve the puzzle

Sidenote: These gifs were recorded by another member of the team for the game Ali Hamad

https://alihamad.se/

Core Mechanic

Butt side mechanic

Eye side mechanic

Mechanic - Produces a light beam that changes the players gravity to be in its pointing direction.

Why? - The design for this mechanic was inspired by the change gravity beam in Portal. The reason this was added was to give the player a way to both reach spaces to high to jump and to far of a gap to jump.

In a certain part of the game you even need to combine two eyes at once to both go up and to the side to move on.

Mout side mechanic

Mechanic - Screams into an ear if close enough that will activate something else like a door opening.

Why? - The design fore this mechanic was as you can imagine inspired from Portal. The reason this was added was to give the player a way to both reach spaces to high to jump and to far of a gap to jump.

In a certain part of the game you even need to combine two eyes at once to both go up and to the side to move on.

Mechanic - Fires a projectile that can activate a cube from a distance.

Why? - This mechanic was designed to give the player a way to solve a puzzle over a larget distance so there would be more options than always connect cubes right in front of the ear (which unlocks door) constantly.

It would also give the player an extra side to activate a cube with a mouth since normally if place side by side the eye would activate a cube when beside the mouth.

Nose side mechanic

Mechanic - Shoots snot on the ground making it slippery and raises movement speed.

Why? - The mechanic of the nose was simply something we believed would add more fun to the game as well as let the player quickly travel from one point to another or jump great distances.

In a certain area this mechinc hold a large importance since the players normal speed is to slow to go through a specific area before they get gnawed down by horrific teeth on the walls.

Level Design

The goals of the level design were three-fold. First it needed to be designed and reflected after the created puzzle. This also refers to the first few puzzles which is a form of tutorial to the mechanics of different sides. Secondly we wanted to design it to create an interesting evironment with environmental storytelling. Thirdly, since we were using asynchronous scene loading to remove loading screens but still keep frame rate up we needed to adapt the design so the player couldn't tell that previous scene disapeared while the next one wasn't loaded.

The second puzzle was supposed to be an easy way to teach the player how to activate the ear which in turn would activate the thing it's connected to.

This puzzle is just after the snot mechanic from the nose side of a cube had been taught to the player. So the level is formed to represent this mechanic put together with other previous mechanics rasing its difficulty.

This level is designed to give the snot mechanic its own unique purpose since the previous times technically could have been solved with the eye mechanic if it had been introduced then. Also let the player experience the horros of hell moahahaha. "Ahem" This level gives the player stress but also excitement of "Will I make or won't I?" when rushing through the tunnel of teeth.