To Aeris

Responsibilities:

Planned and developed puzzle mechanics.
Owning the Level design for the game and puzzle implementation.
Led team meetings and spoke as team leader in standups with producer.
Handled creative direction of the game and writing of narrative.

To Aeris is an ambient 3D puzzle platformer made in Unity, based on the game Journey. The game starts with your bird nest on an alien planet getting attacked by a rabid cat causing your egg to fall from the tree. You're saved by a plant that gives you the power to absorb pollen to heal the environment. From there you embark on a journey to the top of the planet. This leads you to chose between migrating with the rest of your flock or staying behind to heal the planet. Along the way you evolve wings and more plant powers to aid your journey.

The game is the capstone project for my major in Games and Simulation. As of October it is halfway through its 1.5 year development.

The Journey-Like Formula

Area 1 breakdown

In Game Area 1

Area 1# Thumbnail

Area 1 breakdown

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Iteration #1

Iteration 2#

Iteration #2 boring puzzle

Iteration #1

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The Iterative Process

My design goal of To Aeris was to make fun gameplay and interesting areas for a 3D puzzle platformer with a hint of narrative. At the start of the game your player is weak and confused. Gaining their pollen power and then thrusted right into action having to solve puzzles to continue.

The level visually guides players with tokens. These also provides additional incentive to explore the environment to search for more eventually leading to the second collectable, Aeri-bird eggs. These are placed in much harder to find areas and are designed to be more satisfying to collect on each one you collect correlates to an additional bird that migrates with you at the end of the game. (circling back to mechanics).

In trying to shape our game the team went through a lot of different versions of iterations and block outs until we arrived at the current version.

Early versions were changed to make the environments feel more open, and encourage players to seek out pollen keys rather than being handed them.

The Future

This puzzle showcase is just a small portion of part 1 of our game. So far we have about 20-30 minutes of extra content behind the scenes as we continue development. But we have a lot more work to do before I'm ready to show more but stay tuned, this is shaping up to be a great project!