Guns of Icarus Aurora Titan Fight Chromatone Mana Wars
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Click here to view the Chromatone design document.
Chromatone is a 3D, color-based puzzle game built in Virtools. It puts players in the role of a chalemeon named Khamai, who is a celestial spirit of colors. It is Khamai's duty to teach other chameleons the art of mixing and changing colors through demonstration. Khamai does this by changing the colors of insects, a chameleon's favorite snack, to the color of Khamai's "students." By strategically placing pools of colors onto grid spaces within each puzzle, the color of the insects change as they fly over them. When the color of the insects match the color of the chameleon students, the puzzle is complete!
Assistant Game Designer
As assistant game designer, I aided in the brainstorming process of redesigning the game after the initial prototype was created. Working with our produces, I also helped edit, rewrite, and add new content to Chromatone's design document based on the new ideas that the development team used in the final production of Chromatone.
Level Design
As level designer for Chromatone, I went through many iterations of the game's puzzles. The overall goal of the puzzle design was to teach the player the potential "losing conditions" of the game in the earlier levels, introduce a gradual difficulty curve as players advance to later levels, and to ensure that the player learned how to overcome the obstacles of the previous level by applying it within the next level. After much testing, redesigning, and tweaking, the best levels were chosen to go into the game. Imputting these levels into the game was was a team effort between our engineer, the artists, and I. Using our engineer's tile layout tool, I input the tiles of each puzzle into an array of coordinates, similar to that of the boardgame "Battleship." Next, I used another array of coordinates to select which "zen garden" image, designed by our artists, was placed on each tile of the puzzle. After that, I would use another array of coordinates to place the spawn points, goals, and challenges of each level within the puzzle grid. Finally, the environmental art assets were brought into the level as one solid piece and plugged into an array of coordinates over the puzzle grid.
And viola! Here are some screenshots of the game's levels and the original designs for each of them:
