After an internship and some weeks I managed to develop and publish my first game on itch.io. If you don’t want to read you can, as always, watch this video.
What is Castle Light?
Castle Light ist ein Single Player, First Person Puzzle Spiel. Das ganze ist durch ein Follow along tutorial entstanden und ist inspiriert von Portal und The Talos Principle. This is a small ( ca. 5 – 10 minutes) Game. You wake up in a dungeon of an abandoned fortress. Your only way to escape is to manipulate the incoming lasers so that they open the doors for you.
The Mechanics
Obviously, the first step of the development was to program the main game mechanics, the lasers and their reflection.
In the end, quite simple. You shoot a ray from a certain point until it hits something and if the hit object is a reflective one, then at a certain angle the next hit should be shot. Easy.
The whole thing was then extended so that you can pick up and rotate the reflecting objects and that you can actually open a door with the reflected beams.
To add a bit more variation and difficulty, the game also has, among other things, rotating reflective walls that you can turn to a certain angle with buttons and glowing gates that you can’t shoot lasers through.
The Level Design
I lied a little bit, that level design is also a bit inspired by The Elder Scrolls games, because the player’s starting point is a prison. Based on this, I have narrow spaces with little possibility to reflect the lasers and in the spirit of Game Mechanics an introduction of the Meschanics from puzzle to puzzle (6 in total).
Improvements
After the level design, of course, I had a few friends & study colleagues test it. Based on their feedback, I adjusted and improved a few things. For example, I gave a puzzle a little more space. I’ve given the reflective blocks clearly readable textures and refined the control of the player and the grabbing of objects.
Environment Art
Hm, there is nothing much to tell here. Thanks to Unreal’s cooperation with Quixel, I was able to use a lot of so-called Megascan assets. If you are interested read something about Megascan assets here!
Finalization
Finally, I made some UI for the intro and outro. Also a main menu and a small save system. At the moment it only saves settings and checkpoints but always there. It saves stuff!
Of course I also uploaded it to Itch.io and Tada! A finished little game project in Unreal Engine. My first one.