Vextorial
ROLE
Narrative and Technical Designer / Developer
DESCRIPTION
Vextorial is a multi dimensional puzzle platformer where you play as a 2D creature in a 3D environment.
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The player must navigate the insides of cubes flipping gravity and moving between the planes to solve puzzles and progress through the game.
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Vextorial is available on Steam now!
YEAR
2024 - 2025
GENRE
2.5D Puzzle Platformer
PLATFORM
PC
Vextorial is a groundbreaking 2.5D mechanical puzzle game for PC, offering a unique gameplay experience. Players navigate levels using gravity changes and plane-switching, creating endless opportunities for intricate level design and complex tactics. By switching between Gnomonic and Orthographic modes with a simple click, players solve puzzles and reach goals through a series of permutations. The puzzle map itself is a level, where the gravity of the map and the in-game levels affect each other, providing meta-puzzle challenges.
My Work on Vextorial
As a Developer
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I reworked our system for “special” tiles in the tilemap. Previously we had to draw each type of tile on a separate layer but from that point onwards we could make a more efficient system.
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This allowed for the implementation of both toggle and held switches which drastically increased the number of puzzles we could make.
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I wrote the scripts for the Story Menu UI.
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Designed and implemented the system for story progression throughout the game.
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Designed and implemented the system for “Glitch Object” easter eggs.
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Bug fixing.
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Much more...
As a Narrative Designer
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I helped design the overall story, lore, and experience we were going for with the game’s narrative.
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I personally wrote almost all dialogue in the game.
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I personally wrote all Ancient Text logs.
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I wrote the text for collecting each “Glitch Object” easter egg and worked them into the narrative of the game.
As a Designer
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I lead the testing and iteration process for the game. This involved observing playtests and making notes on how the players interacted with puzzles, story elements, and mechanics. Then evaluation ways in which these designs could be tweaked before repeating the process again.
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Implemented changes based on this testing.
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I worked with our Lead Designer on all levels in the game and created a couple myself.
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Worked with our lead level designer on the positioning of NPCs, Ancient Text Logs, and “Glitch Object” easter eggs within levels and the Level Hub.
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Designed the initial User Interface for the Story Menu, though it would go through later iterations after that.
Story Planning
Over the course of development iterated and tweaked various different aspects of Vextorial's story. However, it was always important to plan and make sure that the team was all on the same page about how it was supposed to play out.
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This is why we used Miro to map out the progression of the story and NPCs as the game went on. The first table was made quite early on, before we had a full level hub to work with. This was so I could start writing and have a general sense of how everything was supposed to fit together.
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The second was made later on when another team member wanted more say in the story process. I made it as essentially an updated plan so they'd know what the purpose of everything was.
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It was very important to me that NPCs be purposeful in their dialogue. Vextorial is a puzzle game with a story, not the other way around. Including lots of NPC conversations for "characterisation" or just to remind players the NPC exists would simply condition the player to assume that the NPCs weren't important. As such I wanted to make sure each NPC conversation was meaningfully contributing to their questline and moving the player towards another aspect of their story.
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However there was disagreement on this philosophy as other team members wanted more conversations with the NPCs and for them to be more frequent and a greater presence in the game.
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Another version of the game did exist for a while with a wider number of NPCs but, as I suspected, this resulted in testers skipping more NPC conversations or being confused as to what they were supposed to be talking about.
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There was also tonal whiplash between the conversations that were still present from the previous iteration and the new ones that were more fluffy.
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As such I had to make yet another late change in direction where I tried to strike a balance between the previous two. However, I did lean back towards the fewer conversations that are more substantial as it aligned with my own philosophy and the results from testing.
Characterising Pilo's Brother
Pilo's Brother was an important character to get right as we needed players to want to find him. We showed him almost exclusively through memory flashes that Pilo got as they progressed through the game, deeper into The Bridge.
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Players responded overwhelmingly positively to the comic strips we used for these flashes and as such we wanted to keep adding as many of them as we could. This resulted in the brainstorming above which shows how we were trying to show certain personality traits through different comics and trying not to repeat the same ones too much.
Characterising The Stranger
The Stranger has by far the most dialogue in Vextorial. He was originally meant to serve as a Tutorial NPC but that just didn't work across any of our playtests for two main reasons.
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Reason 1 was that players simply did not talk to him. No matter how stuck players got they would not talk to the tutorial NPC who was there to help.
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Reason 2 was that players would now associate him with just spouting tutorials and as such would ignore him if they thought they knew what they were doing.
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We solved this issue in two ways. The first was that we split the NPC in half. The Stranger would still talk about the Bridge and introduce the player to the world. However, the mechanical tutorials would be given by Stranger Shaped signs in the world. As such we still kept the association with The Stranger and helping the player, but made it clear when story was happening and when gameplay help was happening.
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Next we reconsidered where tutorials needed to go. The obvious way to go about things is to put a tutorial in a level that introduces a new mechanic. The problem was that most players would figure that out just fine and then not want to talk to the NPC in other levels.
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The problem was that players would forget the mechanics they'd learned or not realise they needed to use them again. For example 1-3B which teaches the "headbump" would occasionally be a sticking point. But players would generally figure it out eventually. However, in a 1-3 meta puzzle and the a 1-5 level the player is expected to do it again and many players just didn't realise.
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However, playtesting told me that just a very slight reminder would set them back on course and they never seemed to forget again after that because now the idea was solidified. So we shifted the Hint NPCs to be in later levels to remind the players what they'd forgotten. This was both more effective and more often used.
Ancient Texts
The first question we needed to answer when planning the Ancient Texts was what question we were trying to answer with the Ancient Texts. What was their purpose.
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We had other ideas like a different civilisation that lived down here and its collapse, however we eventually decided on the story of an expedition, presumably the first to travel down into the Bridge.
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We then set about characterising the protagonist and figuring out what we would and wouldn't reveal. It was always our goal to leave more questions than answers so striking a balance here was crucial.
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The key literary inspiration for the Ancient Texts was the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It's a poem I read in school and the creeping sense of growing dread throughout the first half of the poem as things slowly get more and more bizarre and terrifying was something I was keen to try and evoke. As such I read through the poem and tried my best to find uses of language that I felt worked well to create this emotion and tried to work similar language into my own work, though obviously tweaking it to fit.
There were four main drafts of the Ancient Texts before they were implemented into the game, though there were more minor changes made after that.
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Draft 2 was a simple iteration on the first draft but 3 was a response to a logistical issue I had noticed. There were simply too many and they were too long. As with the dialogue earlier it was key, as narrative designer, not to get carried away.
The Ancient Texts are an ancillary element of Vextorial's story and if I want people to actually read them it was key they not outstay their welcome.
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As such I created an abridged set, reducing both the number and length of most of the ancient texts.
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This seemed to pay off during playtesting as the majority of players did read them because they could be read quickly and weren't overly frequent. I made no suggestion that players ought to and some didn't read any of them but the majority of players who read one ancient text read the rest of them as well, which I viewed as a success