Etheric Flow
Etheric Flow was a game developed during a week long game jam in 2021. It was design around three core pillars:
Exploration - Adventure finding new things
Curiosity - Figuring out what can be manipulated throughout the world.
Power/Order - Using the abilities of the player to solve puzzles and platform.
Genre: Action / Exploration / Platformer
Perspective: 2D “Side-scrolling”
Objective: Achieve Contentedness (Healthy)
Story Premise: Going through a loss
Core Gameplay: Manipulation of the environment to progress through levels by changing Emotional States
Player Actions / Manipulations
Manipulating your state to change the level
Manipulating the level directly
Platforming
My Contributions
Design Lead - Mechanical concepting, direction and implementation.
Lead Programmer - All core gameplay scripts and elements, and Player controller.
Audio and Visual Effects - Background transitions, Post Processing, and Animation implementation.
Level Design Tutor / Consultant - Walked two first semester / year students through the level design process and implementation.
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Etheric Flow on Itch
Color Palette Options
Core Mechanics
Platform Manipulation & Original Design
Original design was to have all platforms in the game and aspects of the environment be manipulated by the player.
Active abilities affected:
Platform Rotation
Platform Scaling
Platform Transformation
Or passively through the remaining values of the resources consumed in doing those various actions. For Example as the player consumes rage to push or pull a platform they will generate tranquility. As their rage increases platforms will shake, as tranquility increases time will slow.
Passive Resource Values affected:
Platform and Level Shake
Time Scale
The idea behind this came from the world being the mind scape of the main character, therefore the environment would change as they worked through their own thoughts and feelings represented by the platforming sections and narrative pieces throughout.
Initial brainstorm
PRocess
Level Design
Ensure Lessons Are Taught Multiple Times
One of the core parts of our level design was providing meaningful choice in that the player had multiple paths that they could take through our game while also ensuring they would learn all required mechanics before progressing from one area to the next.
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Initial Level One Design
Ensure Meaningful Player Choice
From our initial level one design to our final we added a second route as the player moves up, with two different puzzles that teach the player about the interactions that platforms can have with gravity when they are initially encountered in a grounded or suspended state.
The intent was to add player choice without sacrificing the lessons the player would need to learn to progress to the next level.
The goal with each of our level segments was to teach the player one to two mechanics. We could then build on this as they progressed through the game introducing more complex puzzles throughout.
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Condensed Core ideas and Concepts
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Final Level ONe Design
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Background transition map over final level design
Playtesting Changes
Throughout the week we ran several playtests to make sure that our design was both effective and communicative to the player about what they needed to be doing at various points throughout the game.
Rotating Platforms interactivity unclear
Platforms not providing feedback when hovered over was making players think they couldn't interact with them. Adding icons and other indicators to platforms provided significant visual clarity.
Scaling Platforms are not being seen as interactable
Solved through homogenizing the indicator across all platforms for interactivity. We placed crystals of varying colors in the center of every interactable platform and the crystals color would be indicative of the platforms type.
Simplification: Time Constraints
Due to various time constraints the team had to change its priorities and plan for the game in order to meet the jams one week deadline. However we wanted to make sure that whatever we cut from the game would not sacrifice our original design intent.
Emotions Effecting the Environment
The first thing we removed was having meters that passively effected the environment, as well as meters limiting the players interactivity with the puzzles. This greatly simplified the process of making levels as well as lowered the number of systems we needed to balance.
Enemies
Though initially planned enemies were completely removed from the game, as they were not needed to communicate our core message to the player.
Multiple Levels Condensed
We decided to condense the multiple levels of our game into one cohesive level in order to prevent us from needing to synchronize data across multiple scenes or worry about tracking various states across scenes.
