Time for a new project. I don’t have a name for it yet, so the codename is Lighthouse.
Lighthouse is an escape room style point and click puzzle game. The gameplay is heavily inspired by the puzzle room segments of Inscryption.
I wanted to work on a project that was small in scope, and focused on a small, dense environment with high levels of interactivity. This approach would result in a high quality experience that I can reasonably build by myself.
I started by building a node-based system for managing interactions. Some objects can only be interacted with if you are standing in the correct location node.
In this example; the green capsule, blue cube, and picture frame nodes can all be reached while at the small table movement node.
The colliders for nodes are only active when standing at the location node they belong to.
After the node system was setup I made a basic player controller that can move forward and backward, crouch, and turn left and right. The player moves on a grid, from location node to location node. There are a few benefits to this system. Firstly since I know all of the places that the player can stand I can place objects in intuitive locations that the player is bound to see. This also lets me get clever with hiding secrets. Secondly, it also lets me prioritize environmental details in some locations over others, again because player movement and camera control is linked to each node.
With the player controller built I now needed to implement an inventory system so that the player can pick up and use items. The items in the game use Unity’s Scriptable objects system, which keeps everything very organized. While I still don’t fully understand how scriptable objects work, I can see how useful they could be in a number of situations.
By clicking on an item the player can pick it up and store it in their inventory, which can be opened with E. Items can be moved to different slots and have a description when clicked on. I can put subtle hints for each item’s uses in the description, which will keep players from getting confused. Inventory items can also be examined. For some items this means viewing their model and for others it’s viewing an image. Images that the player is examining can be dragged around the screen, and will stay visible even in the inventory menu is closed. Certain props in the environment can also be examined, like the blue cube and clock in the video.
Items can be used by dragging them off the inventory panel and onto an object in the scene. This can also be done while examining inventory objects and props.
In addition to an inventory the player also has a journal which they can take notes in by pressing tab. This may be useful for some player to help them keep track of different things. I also plan on putting pages in the journal that were written by the protagonist before the events of the game. These pre-written pages will provide context for the protagonists background and motivations in a non-intrusive way.
Now that I have the basic gameplay set up I can start prototyping the games’ puzzles. I want to avoid having literal puzzles in the environment that the player has to solve, instead I want everything to feel like it naturally belongs there. This has proven to make coming up with puzzles very tough. The kinds of games I’m familiar with the most are FPS games, Platformers, and action-adventure games. As such I don’t have a lot of experience with point and click puzzle games, so I plan on fixing that. I’m gonna play a bunch of point and click games and take notes on the ways the devs give the player information, the general structure, and the puzzle design. Hopefully this will help me think of new ideas for this project. I already played through Tangle Tower and enjoyed it quite a bit, though most if not all of its puzzles are literal puzzle boxes.
If you have any recommended puzzle games please leave a comment!
Benjamin Nelson | Gameplay Mechanics & Programming 