Published on 2019-08-15 23:49 by Pouya Pournasir

This project was a part of my internship for the Gilamard Studio. I was responsible for prototyping a game idea that was proposed before but it was abandoned. I was also involved in level design, puzzle design and interaction design (mainly). I solely finished the prototype at the end of the internship.

Design Criteria

Our goal was to create a unique mobile game where it had the same depth as other console video game. The game was a 3d top-down story-driven, atmospheric adventure game where it had elements of thriller and puzzles.

Story

We are following the story of a young girl (around age 5) who gets lost after she is unable to take her mother’s hand in a hectic street. After wandering in a dark street, she finds a flashlight and finds herself in a dark maze. We attempted to symbolize the girl as the mother itself while she is navigating her psyche and the puzzles were supposed to be related to her past, and each level it descends into a bigger maze she is going deeper into her(future) self.

Gameplay

In each level, the girl has to navigate the maze, find a way out, ran away from monsters and solve puzzles. There were two monsters mainly in the game, one is Lafan, a snake like creature. that follows you and you had to run away from him. And Gerdab, a wandering blackhole that absorbs you if you get close to him. There was an inventory system where the character could access items, open doors, and reveal story-related content.

Interaction Design

You only need to control the young girl with tapping in different parts of the mobile screen, and in case you want to use your flashlight to navigate different parts of the maze, you could hold your thumb and move it, while the character rotates based on your thumb movement. We abstracted a lot of control schemes to reach simplicity and also retain our depth of gameplay.

Written by Pouya Pournasir