Elliott Hübinger Strait

Following the colossal failure of a team project that was Vegismite, I did everything in my power to ensure that the next game I’d work on with a team would not go in the same direction.

 

To begin, the biggest downfall of the prior team project was that everybody had a different direction they wanted to take the game, resulting in no two people working together toward an end goal. To counteract this from happening again, I looked for a team of people who had not decided on a project and were hoping to plan out the game together, where they wouldn’t start moving forward until everyone had agreed what they would be moving towards.

 

The project that we settled on was a concept I brought up in one of our early meetings alongside a basic prototype I put together in a couple days, being a physics based puzzle game where the player can freeze the motion of a single color. I went on to becoming the project’s director, mechanic designer, and level designer.

 

Though VALO was my first time ever working on a puzzle game, I had plenty of experience in the genre due to playing many puzzle games while growing up. Of all the games that I played, there was a reoccurring design flaw that would always bother me when I encountered it, being a fail state where the player would need to restart a level should they want any chance of completing it, be it they were stuck, they lost a key component, or simply died. The primary issue with fail states in puzzle games is that they discourage experimentation with the puzzle space and punish players with poor skills at executing actions. For starters, the player should always feel open to experiment and explore the puzzle with no worries of messing something up, otherwise you risk the player always doubting if they had worked themselves into a corner, possibly leading them to restarting when not even necessary. Secondly, demanding skilled execution in a pure puzzle game is inherently problematic (unless said execution is optional to skip certain portions of a puzzle or get bonus collectibles). A puzzle should challenge the player’s ability to think, not challenge their ability to act.

 

Therefore, I had decided that while designing the levels, and thus puzzles, to VALO, I would ensure that there is no way for the player to get themselves stuck or in a position where they are unable to win. One of the first ways to counteract this was to prevent player death. If a box falls on the player, it simply rests on their head, if the player falls a long distance, they simply land with nothing more than some screen shake and particles. Nonetheless, though this design plan proved to be quite the challenge to work with, I’m both glad I did it and impressed I pulled it off.

 

All in all, the project would not be nearly as great of a success had it not been for the outstanding team dynamic all 9 of us had. Our programmers made an outstanding engine with a great editor, particle system, and lighting effects. Our volunteer artist pushed our game further with a calming and cute style, and our design team worked great off of one another, giving one another ideas or steering existing ideas in the right direction.

 

Ultimately, VALO was even highly admired by the school faculty and was chosen to represent Digipen at PAX West 2018, a reward every member of the team was proud of.

 

Teammates:

Image Rendering Programmer and Tech Lead: Jake Lewandosky [LinkedIn]

Editor Programmer and Vital Debugger: Jacob Michaelis [LinkedIn]

Particle and Physics Programmer: Alex Harte [LinkedIn]

Audio and Tutorial Designer: Stav Hinenzon [LinkedIn]

Producer and UI Designer: Joshua Marlowe [LinkedIn]

Lighting Programmer: Timothey Goodwin [LinkedIn]

Former Design Director: Arthur Nevins [LinkedIn]

Volunteer Artist: Sarah Lintakoon [LinkedIn]