Diandao
An Upside-Down Adventure
Every year the Politecnico of Milan organizes a 12-week game design course. In 2017 I joined a student group for a semester in the creation of Diandao, a 2D puzzle platformer game. My role as a lead designer was to create characters and environment designs, as well as delivering animations and props for the game. The game was developed in Unity, and a playable demo is available for download for both mac and windows.
Story & Target Audience
Diandao is the story of a girl named Xia, who embarks on an adventure to discover the secrets of her origins by piecing together mysterious artefacts. The game targets a young unisex audience, interested in playing story-based puzzle games. The demo features three levels with different environments and difficulty levels.
Level Design
In the first level, the player learns the controls of the reverse gravity mechanics. By wearing the iron gown and launching the lasso, the player can aim, jump, and swing from previously inaccessible position. In the second and third level, the progression becomes increasingly puzzle based. Besides the gown, the player can now take and throw rocks to control its gravity pull, facing more and more complex obstacles along its way.
Visual Storytelling
In the creation of Diandao I took as many opportunities as possible to craft stories visually. From the color palette that mutates from the warm rusty tones of the home to the cold hues of the cavern, to the many details of the environments, I aimed to depict a bigger world outside the demo.
Testing Sessions
A game is a great UX exercise. For a game to be enjoyable it walks a fine line between being too hard or too easy. To assess whether a video game is enjoyable we needed to iteratively test and fine-tune the game mechanics. Among other things, the testing sessions revealed the need for a greater differentiation between foreground affordances and background. I thus redesigned the environments with greater contrast, to deliver better hints to the player.