Quantum Shuffle
A spatial puzzle game.
Quantum Shuffle is a first person puzzle game where the goal is to get to the exit. Each level is divided into multiple rooms on a grid, and you have to shuffle the rooms around to activate levers, get boxes and create a path to the exit.
This was a group project of 8 weeks, made for school. The focus of the assignment was to create the most polished concept that we could manage within the timeframe. For the first two weeks, we had to pitch two concepts using pitchdecks, make a proof of concept, level designs and a style guide. Afterwards we spent around 4 weeks on development, redesigns and playtesting. In the last two weeks we were mainly focused on polishing, such as adding sound effects, lighting and making the game play smoother.
Shuffle mechanic
Most of my time during this project was spent creating and improving the main room shuffle mechanic. It's a relatively simple system, where rooms are divided into cells, which are displaced in groups by the Gridmanager. To create the illusion that the room is rotating back into the grid when it moves out of it, we create a duplicate that will take the place of the old room and move the old room to where it would enter the grid.
I also worked on the controller for the shuffle UI. For this I created a 3D UI that you can move around on a pivot, so that the player can inspect and interact with the rooms in a more natural way. Additionally, I made a shader to simplify the rooms and only render the objects within the playing space, so as to give the illusion of the rooms looping around.
Level Design
Throughout the project I was one of the ones responsible for making level designs. Many of these designs got iterated on or scrapped after playtesting and collecting feedback. Level 3 is the final design I had after 3 revisions.