Husk
ROLE
Designer
DESCRIPTION
I was a level and system designer on Husk. I whiteboxed the overworld and puzzles along with helping to define the gameplay loop and scope of the project.
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When development began, I facilitated the interactions between the overworld and combat.
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I also wrote the intro text for the game, though the plot of the game was not written by me.
YEAR
2023
GENRE
Puzzle/DeckBuilder with turn based combat
PLATFORM
PC
LEVEL DESIGN
I was in charge of creating the initial whitebox layout for the level, and then later making the functionality of the puzzles.
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The level would need to be interesting enough to drive the action of the game, but not take too much of the player's time since the most of the gameplay would be spent in combat encounters in the book.
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I devised two puzzles, being the potion riddle (where the player had to use a riddle to try and figure out which potion was safe to drink) and the bookcase puzzle, where the player had to click on books in a certain order in order to open the bookcase and retrieve the key inside. The third puzzle was made by one of my teammates.
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Whilst obviously less exciting than the combat encounters, I wanted the puzzles not to just feel like an afterthought, and for them to be engaging for the player.
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I was also responsible for all interactions between the Overworld and other levels, like transitioning between the two. Furthermore there were interactions where the player's actions in one part of the game would affect others, for example drinking the wrong potion in the Overworld will decrease the player's health in their next combat encounter. The player also gains keys and hints for the puzzles in the Overworld through combat encounters within the book.
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Gameplay Loop
When it came to designing Husk, our team leader had a very distinct vision for the game but had a hard time explaining it to everyone else. This lead to uncertainty and confusion and meant some team members didn't understand how our individual elements were going to fit together. Another issue was that there were quite a lot of extra ideas that had been mentioned but were not necessarily fully fleshed out.
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As such I took it upon myself to sit down with the team leader and clearly define exactly what it was that the player would be doing in the game, trimming it down to its bare essentials and making sure everyone understood how the game was going to work.
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Whilst eventually some changed got made to the way things worked exactly, this was mostly the blueprint we would use going forward.
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When it came to development of the game, it was also my responsibility to make this gameplay loop work. I worked on the Overworld sections of the game myself and then made all the functionality for transitioning between the two parts of the game and having the players' actions in one affect the other.
Scope
Similarly to the case of the game's unclear gameplay loop, we felt it was necessary to define the scope of our vertical slice in order to avoid us ending up making significantly more or less than we would have liked. Furthermore, defining this more clearly meant it was much easier for our developers and artists to work and for the management side of things to predict how long it was going to take us to finish the game.
Writing
Intro Text
Narrative was a part of the game that we had initially decided to put on hold since we didn't want to spend time on that whilst elements of core functionality were not yet in place.
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In the last week of development, the team leader asked me to write an introductory paragraph and implement it into the game with a kind of typewriter effect. I wrote several different versions of the paragraph and then he selected his favourite for me to iterate on. Above is the final product of that process.
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Potion Poem
I wanted to add a riddle because I like riddles and I felt like it fit very nicely with Ivo's vision for the game.
What potion would you drink?
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