Amsvartne

Story rich atmospheric puzzle-platformer set in a mystical dieselpunk world

https://corviangames.itch.io/amsvartne

Amsvartne is game project I am working with the start-up group I am part of, Corvian Games. It's an atmospheric puzzle platformer about navigating a mystical mine in a dieselpunk world. The game is built in unity and I've worked on game design, puzzle design and programming. I left the team (on good terms) in May, but from what I've heard they plan to finish up the project soon and put a final version on itch.

Made in Unity, Group Project

Things I've Worked on/I'm Working On:

Programmed and designed the light mechanic and its interactions with objects like mirrors, crystals and light sensors
Designed the first level and worked iteratively on many puzzles for it as we figured out how we wanted the game.
Programmed the respawn and lamp recharge system
Programming many level design and testing tools to speed up the development process
Programmed many different puzzle elements like moving platforms, rune puzzles and levers
Helped with narrative, worldbuilding and the ludo-narrative connection with the puzzles

For a long while we planned to have dialogue in the game, but we later removed it to focus on showing not telling and to downscale the amount of sprites to make.

During the fall of 2024 we were doing some game jam style quick prototypes to get used to working together and find a cool game concept. Amsvartne, which begun as Escape The Mine, was one of those concepts and was pitched as a narrative focused platformer with a few puzzles, inspired by games like Limbo and Oknytt

My first job as game designer was to work on exactly what those puzzles would be and setting up the main mechanics. As it's far easier to say "and we'll add some puzzles here" than it is to actually do that.

First Screenshot of the game

After some early testing one of the key elements of the game we identified was light, both as a concept and main mechanic. The player, called Kol, finds a helmet with a light source and can use it to solve puzzles.

The light mechanic also gave me as the designer a lot of ideas and concepts to make puzzles with. I designed puzzle elements like mirrors, lenses, crystals, light sensors and magical dark areas which I think could make for very cool puzzles.

Gif of how the mirrors work. Taken from an earlier version of the game where we planned to have the characters be in 3D for a 2.5D style

To the right-->

Gif how a crystal lens, mirrors and darkness. Darkness lets the player pass through but not light. Players can either send light around it with mirrors or use crystal lenses which turns the light into crystal light that can pass. Also, yes the light gets stuck on the mirror, that was a bug.

I also wrote most the code for our note system when we switched from using fungus. The system stores notes (and dialogue while we had it) using scriptable objects. It has a scriptwriter effect that causes letters to appear letter by letter, and a button to skip to the end of the note.

I also used textMeshPro style sheets to have icons display in the the texts.

To help test the game and new features we were developing I also made a testing toolkit script for the player. It features the variables seen to the side as well as keys for teleporting between checkpoints and summoning the camera to the player.

Having a toolkit like this helped speed level design and testing a lot, and I will prioritize making one for future projects. From speaking with Ellis who works on sound design for the game, he also seemed to have really appreciated the feature.

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