AIV Warm Up Game Jam: Next in Line

Theme: Beyond the Wall | Period: 5 days | People: 8 | UE5 

First-person puzzle adventure, heavily centered on mood and the historical theme of the Berlin Wall.

I was leading a team of 8 people with another game designer. My job was also to design the level from paper, through grey box, to enrichment.

We won the jam by designing a believable world in a condensed space rich in details and mechanics.

A puzzle adventure during a 5-day jam

We started with the idea of the mechanic of dying to free the path to the next character. This means having many obstacles along the road that require the player to die in the correct way. We initially placed the puzzles in sequence on a relatively long path that would go along the Wall and started designing the layout.

Soon, we realized that the scope was getting out of hand. Any puzzle required us to build the context around it, show anticipation to make it readable, and show its short-term goal over it.

As a solution, we decided to shrink everything into a contained area, overlapping puzzles. This allowed us to obtain many results:

• The long-term goal is always visible to the player (the plaza beyond the Wall).

• The player can die and return to the puzzle within a few seconds, without the need for checkpoints.

• The level was 10 times smaller, but 10 times richer in details.

Convey emotions through level design

We faced the serious theme of the years of the Berlin Wall, and like in "Paper, Please" we had to immerse the player in that experience. The level design helped in that.

• We designed the whole game in a condensed area to give the player the feeling of being trapped and claustrophobic emotions.

• We want to make the player escape from above the wall, to gain freedom elevating from the inhumane life the character was living.

• Reaching the top of the building opens up the view to what is beyond the wall. The last desperate action brings the player to the other side (alive).