Lanthera

About the Game

Our game is called Lanthera and the game is made for the puzzle lovers that want an immersive game with an environmental narrative that's up to player interpretation. The game takes place in the mindscape of someone who has psychological difficulties, solve their problems by retrieving artifacts, a part of your essence of what you are or what you were and toss it on the inner flame which brings warmth to the soul and restores colour back to their world. 

We got two key words to ground our game on “Growth and Fragility” and Lanthera mostly has a metaphorical sense of conveying.

How the concept came about was born from the idea we got during our brainstorming session where a world deprived of colour would was brought to the team. The team had simalair intrest in personal growth and therapeutical practises, we wanted it to be about the mind, trauma and the strive to fight against ones demons. how fragile the mind could be and how to slowly rapair it. 

The Idea of the lantern was to make the point of view more narrow just like people who suffers from deppresion view is narrow and self centered not allowing one self to see the whole picture and we wanted to convey it with the mechanics by using the latnthern as a light that purifys the darkness in peoples mind.

Building up the game

SFX

In the game i got to do things where my interest lies, sound design, besides that I did a bit of the level design as it felt that i should do more. I tried to make the song for the game and the SFX from scratch which is different from last game project where we took sounds from the internet and altered them to fit our game. For the audio I had a second party program that is industry standard in the game development world for audio design, called Wwise and I had to learn the program from scratch.

I recorded water bottles and metal bowls etc to make the sounds in the game. It would have been easier to have pre-made sounds but I wanted to learn sound design and the mental ease of not being copyrighted.

I worked closely with the programmers so that i could integrate the sounds in their script, for example i wanted a push sound only when the character moves with a "heavy" object and needed to do very simple scripting, but what took time was learning what to write and understanding the existing code to know where to implement the new code. It took way longer to have everything ready because of the time learning the in and outs of the program and I still have more to learn.

Level Design

I made 2 of the blockouts of our game, We made the desiction to make the first room a tutorial room, we had no UI/ text we had easy puzzles to make the player and we wanted the player to walk and try things out and only when its solved they can get to the hub. we had multiple playtest with gamers and non gamers, nad all got past the tutorial, some took longer than others but not by much. 

at first we thought that the player could rotate the camera so the levels where made with walls that you could look around and fin secrets. but we later realized that would be best to make the levels more vissible wherever you are so we removed most walls to make everything clearer for the player to know where to go and how to solve the puzzles.

the hub:

The hub was where the win event of the game would be and the thought was that you could choose a pathway to a puzzle you would get to first but that was later changed by the end of gp2. The hub had 4 door pathways two to get to the puzzle room and two shortcuts back to the hub with one of the shortcut doors being up to debate if it would be a shortcut back to the hub or a potential 3rd puzzle, but was later decided to be a shortcut back to the hub.  

Exploration room 2: 

I had more of a puzzle in the exploration room but it was scrapped so that it wouldn't be hard on the player. I just left the bare minimum to get the player used to the mechanics for the 2nd puzzle.

We had to change it a bit by the end because the camera we had was controllable before but it feels kinda out of place for the puzzles and we got some feedback on our playtest about the camera controls made them confused the players when they couldnt see what doors open and etc. so victor had deleted the walls in the hub because the wouldn’t see what happens behind them and decorated the map.

I wanted to use a copy the characters mesh to show the player the fake cage that the player can walk through with the lanthern to stick with the theme that we made and guide the player to the right path, But we found out by, and use invisible floors that is made visible and walkable with the lanthern.