Made with : Louis Desprez, Samuel Lucq, Pierre Boulenger, Alan Cornu, Baptiste Klonek, Sevgi Altay and Eddy Dubois--Presne
Overview
"Tiny Tale" is a project made in 3 weeks with an 8 people team. The game is a VR Escape Room/Puzzle game heavily inspired by the Grimm brothers' tales, more precisely the tale of "Jack and the Beanstalk".
During this project, I worked on production management, level design, puzzle designs and writing the documentation.
Project's teaser
Design process
Project's pillars
When creating the original concept, some elements were defined as core elements of it, such as :
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The environment had to be gigantic compared to the player's size
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All puzzles had to be interactible and somewhat physical
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The universe and the different puzzles had to reference the Grimm Brothers' tales
Project's genesis
When first starting the project, the main goal of the team was to create a VR escape room/ After exploring a few themes, we landed on the inspiration of Jack and the Beanstalk since it allowed us to venture into using the idea of gigantic environments and puzzle, which is hard to reproduce in a physical escape room.
Controls
One the first challenges encountered when creating a VR game is thinking about the way the player moves (if he does) in the virtual environment. Due to the limited space we had to test the game and the desire to have a vast environment, we couldn't have the player physically move in the place he was playing the game. Thus, we had to choose between two options :
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Having the player move by "sliding" his character using the joystick
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Giving the player the ability to teleport, while aiming with his controller
While both options were tempting at first, the first option (sliding) presented a major inconvenience : it could induce motion sickness to some players. Taking this drawback into account, we finally decided to use the teleport method for player movement.
The choice of the teleportation as the way for the player to move around in the environment also allowed us to explore and play around with that ability. The environment being gigantic, some places could be unreachable for the player if his teleportation wasn't long enough. Thus, we decided that the player would now need to upgrade his teleport range by finding the "Seven-league boots".
The playable area is not limited to countertops, but also includes the floor and all the different pieces of furniture.
Level Design
The designs' pillars being so specific about the aspect of the environment, we had to determine some rules that would guide the creation of the level :
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Due to the scale of the level, precise metrics were required
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The height of items and playables areas would be one of the challenges for the players
From those rules and some concept arts we decided to procede with a blocking of the level. In order to ensure that we had believable and logical metrics, we decided to use a 3D modeling software that would allow us to use real and existing kitchen furnitures assets, with precise size.
Early level blocking
From that early blocking, a few iterations went by in order to get the current finished version of the level.
The precise metrics also allowed easier communication with the 3D modeling team, that would allow faster production and an easier and faster engine implementing pipeline.
Finished level, player's POV
Designing puzzles
When designing the puzzles, we had to focus on one major element throughout all of the puzzles : they had to be "physical", requiring the player to directly interact with the systems as if they were real.
Case study : "Ropes and counterweights"
One of the very first puzzle encountered by the player is called "ropes and counterweights". In this puzzle, the player first has to find a way to enter the french buffet, in which he'll have to lover a platform by making a counterweight travel through a labyrinth using ropes (you can see the puzzle in the video trailer).
Not only did we want this puzzle to have physical feeling, but we also wanted it to require a bit of memorizing from the player. So, we created the interior of the cupboard in a way that would make the player unable to see the second half of the labyrinth from where the ropes are located.
Puzzle structure
Counterweight's maze (first half)
After some playtesting, we found out that the puzzle had a few affordance related issues and a level design that required improvement due to the player not understanding how you were supposed to open the side of the cupboard (if they even saw that there was an opening on said cupboard).