Game Writer - Narrative Designer
An AAA-experienced writer striving to craft stories that stick with you long after the credits roll.
Enlighten
GENRE
2.5D Side Scroller
ENGINE
Unity
TIME
2 weeks (2021)
TEAM SIZE
9
MY ROLES
Sound Designer
Content Designer
Music Composer
Side Scroller
Single Player
PC Game
GAME OVERVIEW
This game is the result of a 2-week project assignment at my Futuregames education. The brief and theme was "A magical mystery" and the target audience was 10-15 year olds.
With that in mind we made this little game called Enlighten, a Trine inspired 2.5D puzzle platformer where you play a witch who lost her cat in an abandoned spooky castle. You must solve puzzles with the help of your fire and levitation spells in order to make your way through the vast castle to find your dear companion.
DOWNLOAD ON ITCH
DESIGN PILLARS
Progress in the game through solving simple puzzles using your magical wand.
PUZZLE SOLVING
ATMOSPHERIC
One of our core visions was to create a magical and spooky atmosphere to convey the feeling of mystery.
CASUAL
WIth the target audience in mind, it made sense to make the experience casual and the puzzles not too difficult.
GAME LOOP
EXPLORE
SOLVE PUZZLE
PROGRESS
Fully explore the vast castle to find the clues you need to progress.
Remember, when solving the puzzles your wand is your best friend!
Make your way through a total of 3 levels to find out what happened to your cat.
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
Soundtracks
My vision for the soundtracks was closely connected to our design pillar, ATMOSPHERIC. It was important to me to convey the feeling of mystery in audio.
Atmospheric Ambience Music
Setting the mood of the game through audio is always a challenge I welcome, and for this project I realized quite early on that the way to do it was through mixing ambience sounds with short melody loops. By not going too heavy on chords and instead focusing on ambience I believe I managed to achieve this goal.
However, while the main menu theme and the ingame track carry a tone of mystery, I wanted the ending scene to convey a feeling of success since the player finds their dear cat, so for that reason the ending music has a different vibe than the other tracks.
Sound Effects
Making sound effects for this game really helped me develop my knowledge of sound shaping. Working with plugins like Imager and Fracture, I learnt a lot about how to change and shape a sound to reach my vision as a sound designer.
CONTENT
Fire & Levitation as core mechanics
Originally I wanted to include three game mechanics in the game, but after communicating this to the team I realized we needed to scope that number down to two, due to time limitations. During the creative process, we were spitballing ideas for gameplay and content and I contributed by suggesting to build the gameplay around abitilies like fire and levitation.
The levitate spell enables the player to move objects around.
