Personal Development Sprint: Level & Puzzle Design Project

Vision

The game space takes place on a remote island where a strange facility overlooks the ocean. Carrying nothing but a sophisticated yo-yo-like contraption, the player goes forth to unravel its secrets. For architectural inspiration, I used the following sources:

Art Nouveau
Rococo
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
Steamboy

The Tool: A Yo-Yo

The yo-yo is a physics-based toy, familiar to most everyone. Although simple, it’s also a sophisticated physics device. To my knowledge, I've never played a game that tried to create a yo-yo physics simulation. The centrifugal forces in conjunction with friction yield fun results that even a child can appreciate. Simulating them in a game world has a nice additional bonus since many of the real world limitations such as string length, string strength, energy and personal skill can be ignore in favor of fun and original game play elements.

The Puzzles

The level is about establishing expectations for the tone and mood of a scientific hideout using a visual style that sets anticipation for what is it come. Puzzle 1 & 2 are illustrated in the video below. Puzzle 3 is unfinished visually, however functionally this is how it was intended to work.

As you cross the bridge and enter into the threshold of the spiral tower, there is a trough with a sign pictorially instructing the player to put the yo-yo in the trough. When the player puts the yo-yo in the trough, sounds of big heavy equipment and machinery resonate through tower. As the yo-yo rolls down the trough, you hear metal and machinery corresponding with its movement. The sounds become faster and louder as the yoyo picks up speed. Glimpses through the windows hint at something big traveling down the center of the tower with the yo-yo.

With the sounds increasing in intensity, anticipation builds as the full picture remains unclear to the player. Once you arrive a giant disk thumps to the bottom of the chamber echoing and rattling throughout the tower. Picking up the yo-yo, immediately the disc rattles back and forth, again connecting the yo-yo to the disk. Visually, the disk and the yo-yo are similar in markings and shape. As you play with the yo-yo, the disk reacts by shaking or rattling. As you spin it horizontally, the disk begins to spin too and lights up. Some things in the tower begin to float up lightly off the ground. The faster you twirl the yo-yo, the faster the disk spins, becoming brighter and lowering the gravity in the room.

Now everything in the room starts to get affected by the lowered gravity including you. As you levitate you float up the tower. You can control the angle of float by the angle of the yo-yo twirl. There is a platform towards the top of the tower with a control panel. As you get to a platform on the top and position yourself over it, you stop spinning the yo-yo and immediately gravity returns to normal. Everything comes crashing to the ground echoing throughout the chamber.

On the console are a couple of levers. Manipulating the levers opens the dome revealing the series of blue disks hovering above. From there, the story continues and the live experiment begins.

Chosen Technology & Tools

The Crysis SB2 editor and Google SketchUp were used to complete this project. To walk through the level in Crysis, download the level files here (9.59 MB) and follow the instructions below:

Extract the zip file to the Crysis\Game\Levels directory.
Load Crysis and hit the tilda key.
Type con_restricted 0 and hit enter.
Type map csroby and hit enter.

Video Footage

	Video demonstrating physics puzzles in Google SketchUp
	PART 1: In-game video walkthrough of the game area in Crysis
	PART 2: In-game video walkthrough of the game area in Crysis

Screenshots