Lanthera
Lanthera is a puzzle-adventure game that explores the balance between fragility and growth through a psychological vision.
Players navigate a surreal world that mirrors the complexities of the human mind during times of emotional distress, uncovering abstract landscapes that changes and evolve in colors and shape as they progress.
https://futuregames.itch.io/lanthera
Gameplay / Narrative design
I iterated on the character’s movement and other mechanics with our programmers through-out the project; like how ‘Box Pushing’ should work in the given environment and how enemy-NPCs could be implemented the best way in order to support our theme. Basic movement was created within the first week using a navmesh agent before we had exemplary levels to test it with, so I found out through discussion what kind of game feel, speed, and distances we would deal with, or what kind of camera movement would fit this atmospheric game.
I feel that we made a lot of a soft decisions on some mechanics early on, while workshopping puzzles and gameplay, that didn’t result in strong overall progress in design, but seemed to leave vague understandings of how things might be. This rang bells in my head about over scoping.
A midway review after 2 weeks of work helped to decide what features to cut. Instead of having the 'enemy NPC' harm the player, it was designed with a new purpose; To guide the player's attention and to give life to the environment with wandering movement.
Game loop in a nutshell!
1. Explore with lantern.
2. Leave the lantern to expose yourself to metaphorical conflicts.
3. Use the lantern light to seek clarity and reveal symbols in puzzles.
4. Bring artifacts to an inner flame to show permanent growth.
Problem: Player could push puzzle objects inside a wall.
Solution: We slide the player along an angle between character, wall and given movement input direction.
Risk: We're tight on time, and it's a time consuming mathy solution!
I marked locations in advance in the environment where the player should pass by or go to and interact with something. This way I could populate the right spots with NPCs to guide the player and keep the amount of them on a feasible level.
I thought about how the player moves through the level and understood that through my own gameplay as well as testers’.