Lead Designer on a Senior-year game at DigiPen / 3-person team / single player / C++

Tumbleton’s Fortune is a 3d platformer with puzzle elements set in sandy Egypt. Players navigate the world and solve puzzles by attaching various objects to the environment.

Designed all the gameplay. The game above started out as a 3d version of The Incredible Machine. Players were given a scene and they had to get a ball from start to finish by placing ramps, springs, and other objects that would interact with each other. After playtesting, we found our that players would spend 70% thinking where to place objects and rotating the camera and 30% actually trying different solutions. This wasn’t fun. As the designer for the project, I decided to change the game into a puzzle platformer to get more interaction from players and Tumbleton’s Fortune was born. My focus with the gameplay was to combine two aspects – puzzle solving using our unique mechanic of snapping objects anywhere to the environment, and old-school platforming sections. My thinking was that mixing tried and proven platforming sections with something new would interest the players and push them along to continue. After playtesting it, we got very positive feedback and continued with my approach.

Designed and built all the levels using a custom built level editor. My goal with making the levels was to seamlessly connect 2 styles of gameplay – puzzle solving and action platforming. This meant coming up with puzzles that would take advantage of our unique puzzle mechanic that lets the player snap objects to any part of the environment. Aside from creating and positioning platforms throughout the world, I made special “action moments” – exciting sequences that the player would remember like being chased by a giant boulder. I helped create the level editor as well, figuring out what actions we needed and designed the user interface to make it very user-friendly, allowing players to create, save and play their own levels in game.

Built game objects and defined their logic using a custom built object editor. All the objects in the game from the main character to moving platforms were built by me using our in-house object editor that my teammates made. The process consisted of me loading a 3d model into the editor, putting a texture on it, and creating a collision box for the model. Then, I would calibrate every object parameter like mass, density, velocity and attach scripted triggers to the object that allowed for a variety of actions from AI movement to collision logic. Here is a video detailing how the process worked: