Vára

Vára is a 3D puzzle-adventure game where the player uses a beam of light to solve puzzles by matching runes and moving special objects. Over the course of the game, the player character Brigid traverses a frozen island along with a phoenix-crow named Lugh who teaches her about the power of her lantern and guides her throughout the game.

As the Design Lead and Level Designer for this game, I contributed about half of the game’s design paradigm and prototyped the gameplay mechanics during early development. I worked together with designers Winson Han and Kaila Harris during this time to learn Unreal 4 for later when we needed to communicate what we wanted to the engineers.

After being greenlighted and moving to production, I was in charge of tuning gameplay and creating all of the puzzles for the game. I laid the foundation of our game’s entire map, then began creating puzzles for each section to not only teach the player the core mechanics of the game but to also provide a smooth difficulty curve. Additionally, I needed to adhere to what the artists wanted to do with the game’s environment.

I ended up working with both the engineers and the artists on various tasks throughout the project’s lifespan. I was working directly with the programmers on iterating on the gameplay loop and getting things to work smoothly. For the artists, I assisted with importing and hooking up animations - this eventually led me to implementing all of the aspects of the game relating to our bird character Lugh, including how he flies in and out of our game’s checkpoints.


This game only supports controllers.

Platform
    Windows
Engine
    Unreal 4
Language
    Unreal Blueprints
Project Duration
    12+ months
Project Completion
    April 2018
Team Size
    13
Role
    Puzzle & Level Designer, UI Implementation, Systems Implementation,     
    Animation Implementation