Metro Physis

Metro Physis is a puzzle game made by me and two other people in Unity, based on physics; during development, I had the role of Puzzle Designer.

We decided not to have a hard fail state (so no death, no game over, no reset) which meant that I had to create puzzles that would be compelling but simultaneously solvable even if the player made a mistake. To do so, I also had to think about Level Design.

We also wanted to give the player agency over the resolution of puzzles, which means that most of them have more than one solution, depending on how creatively the player uses the powers at their disposal.

Here, I will showcase the steps I followed during production from early development to the present state of the game.

Game Overview

In Metro Physis, the player goes around different subways, collecting filters for a “magic” camera that unlocks powers needed to solve puzzles and progress.

Camera powers are:

–Push: Push objects away from the player;

–Teleport: Teleport objects to the player;

–Minimize: Make objects smaller;

–Maximize: Make objects bigger;

–Stop: Stop objects in time;

–Record: Record the movement of an object;

All these powers can be mixed in different ways, for example, the player can Teleport an object to themselves, then activate Record and Push it. The Record will repeat the push of the object in a loop, and while the object is looping it can be made bigger with Maximize to create a stable platform that the player can use to reach their destination.

Stages of Development

Getting accustomed

When I started working on the project, the mechanics were already implemented, even if in a rough shape, so I started playing with them in an empty Unity scene to understand their potential and limits. This process had a double purpose: First, to understand how these mechanics could be used, and second to find bugs and report them.

During this stage, I was mostly focused on finding the fun of the powers by themselves, in an “empty room”.

Prototyping

Once I felt like I had a good grasp of the powers and most of the bigger bugs were solved, I started prototyping different possible puzzles; to do so, I made a “Playground”, a new empty scene in Unity, where I created multiple use cases for the powers, without a specific purpose other than experimenting.

Some examples of these experimentations are:

During this process I freely followed my creativity, trying to imagine different use cases for the powers; then, I tried some small sequences of puzzles to start imagining the tutorialization of the game.

From this process, I started gathering Puzzle ideas that I later used in the actual levels.

Tutorialization

In the next stage of development, I started working on how to explain the powers to the player through gameplay, giving them simple tasks where they had to use their abilities to progress.

We wanted to have the least amount of UI possible, to create a diegetic experience. This meant that I had to create a tutorial where the player is forced to interact with the new mechanics that are step-by-step introduced to them, but, at the same time, making these sections a part of the game that doesn’t feel disconnected from the rest of it, but more like a “Chapter One” of the experience.

In this video, the first tutorial I made.

In this first draft of a tutorial, the powers were presented to the player in fast succession, and even if the puzzles presented were good, we realized that the player wouldn’t have enough time to get accustomed to a power before getting another one. This was a great learning experience that gave me the opportunity to understand pacing and how to teach players new mechanics, while experimenting with new puzzle ideas that I used in the final version of the Tutorial.

The current state of Metro Physis

With everything I learned during the experimentation I talked about until now, I decided to start over to re-design the Tutorials in a more digestible way, giving the player more time to experiment with the mechanics presented to them. While approaching this new task, I was playing the brilliant puzzle-game “Cocoon”, which really opened my mind on how to approach Game Design in general and Puzzle Design in particular. So I tried to follow Cocoon’s creator philosophy of creating small, simple steps for the player to surpass while teaching them the mechanics one by one.

The tutorial ended up being made of three levels, in each of which the player gets introduced to two of the powers: from level to level, the player will keep the powers they got from the previous ones and will have to learn how to use them together, but keeping puzzles simple and focused on the new power just acquired.

Every time the player acquires a new power, they will have to face at least two puzzles before acquiring the next one. At the end of each tutorial level, the last puzzle the player has to face requires the use of both the new powers they acquired in the level to be solved.

After the tutorial, I worked on “Aristotle Tower”, which is a middle game level; here the player has access to all the powers and will have to use them smartly to progress.

In the first level of the tutorial, the player starts without any powers, so that they can get accustomed to the commands, then teleport and push powers are introduced.

In the second level, the player has Push and Teleport powers, and during the level will acquire Minimize and Maximize. The puzzles in this level use Teleport and Push as “Helping Powers”, mostly making the puzzles less frustrating, while Minimize and Maximize have to be used to actually complete the puzzles so that the focus is on these newly acquired mechanics.

The third Level introduces Stop and Record Powers; as these are the most complex powers, I decided to have the puzzles introducing the powers to be pretty simple, and then to have a more complex puzzle to conclude the tutorials, where you can use all the powers to find a solution.

The last level I created is called “Aristotle Tower”. This is a more advanced level where the player has access to all the powers and is presented with more complex puzzles; As it is set in a tower, I wanted to make the player feel the verticality of the level since the beginning. To do so, I decided to make the level start with a huge glass platform that enables the player to watch underneath and see the whole tower from above. There are multiple other occasions where the player can look up and down and realize how everything is connected and they’re moving downwards.

Conclusions

While working on this project I had the chance to learn a lot about my creative process and my approach to Game Design in a somewhat prolonged production. Working in a very small team allowed us to give each other useful feedbacks all the time, creating a loop where, while Designing Puzzles, I would find bugs that I would then report to the programmer, who in turn would play my levels and give feedbacks on them, while the other designer worked on writing narrative and giving more feedback on our work, keeping the vision for the whole project intact.

I had the chance of having some people test the game which resulted enjoyable and fairly easy to understand, even if some problems arose in readability and onboarding, which we took care of before halting development.