Ary

Ary and The Secret of Seasons

Platformer Adventure

Game Designer / Level Designer

PC with controller

Unity

Internship at Fishing Cactus

Work Highlights

The Challenges

In a professional experience, it’s always difficult to join a production that’s already well advanced. This is especially true when the pre-production, lead by the vision owner Exiin, was not well done. The first part of the challenge was to communicate with both studios in order to understand the guidelines of the game and its narrative aspect. These were essential elements to understand what they really wanted and build levels accordingly.

The second part of the challenge was the struggle to design levels that properly blend puzzle solving, exploration and platforming with only a few gameplay elements.

As a result, I attempted to develop a level design process which would not only be suitable for the various gameplay types but also for the Bubble Seasons, which is a unique way to create and solve puzzles.

It was an iterative process, my teammates and I prototyped different puzzle situations that should be interesting and challenging. These puzzle situations take in account only the different features that were chosen for this specific area that was the summer temple.

With these prototypes, we worked each of us on different part of the temple and used them to build an interesting layout that included the narrative context.

I made all my 2D layouts on slate to be the more iterative possible. I switched between the 2D layout and the blockout to prototype my ideas quickly.

Even if the game was well advanced, we did not have metrics at the beginning so we decided to create them according to the values chosen for the different features of the game. We worked with these theorical metrics all throughout the rest of the production.

Blockout