I joined Puny Astronaut midway through the development of Skye Tales in order to help them get the game across the finish line.
My main responsibilies included:
Refining and polishing existing puzzles
Designing and overseeing accessibility features
Authoring tools to analyse gameplay data
Designing and creating new content, including:
Level flow and blockouts
3 Large story-based puzzles
16 Smaller quickfire puzzles
Dozens of smaller interactable features such as instruments and responsive toys
Sample Work
Light Puzzle
Here you can see one room of a large story puzzle I designed for Whispridge, the last chapter of Skye Tales.
Premise:
Use mirrors to bounce coloured light beams into the matching crystal sphere.
Challenges:
Readability: As developers we understand that light uses Red, Green, & Blue but since Skye Tales is aimed at children under 10 we choose to use the primary colours of paint Red, Yellow, & Blue.
Accessibility: As with all puzzles in Skye Tales we needed to use two forms of information to tell the player about the different beams. We assigned each colour a number, and used arrow(s) to denote it’s number, and direction of travel.
Intuitive: Skye Tales needed to have predictable outcomes, especially since the target audience was young. The main issue with the Light Puzzle was how to telegraph refraction, so I simplified it.
The Light Beam entering a sphere would change angle on entry, again on exit, and always pass through the centre of the sphere. The exit angle is just the entrance angle flipped.
Constellation Puzzle
This puzzle had originally had been concepted as the celebration for completing chapter one. However the team had some usability issues they couldn’t solve and had shelved the idea.
I took the core concept, and redesigned it as a Challenge Puzzle for chapter 4. The main issue was how to frame the puzzle and still have Skye be visible and easily controlable. Rather than pulling the camera back and having Skye be too small on screen, I focused on how to guide the player from star to star even when they couldn’t see the whole constellation.
Original Concepts
Premise:
Skye pulls connections from one star to another to join them. Once all stars have been connected the constellations image would be revealed.
Challenges:
Communication: When Skye interacted with a star, there were a number of possiblities that all had to be communicated to the player. Which star or stars could connect to the current one, which stars were full, and if a connection the player was trying to make was valid. I created a rough logic flow for our programmers to follow.
