CGD: Week 4 and 5 Recap

These two weeks were spent brainstorming our story and puzzles to get ready to present them in class. We finally established the setting and background for our game, now dubbed Land of Sol.

Our story evolved into the tale of the island of Sol, whose inhabitants worshipped the Sun God and were suddenly attacked by the evil Dragon. The Dragon started possessing islanders and forcing them to destroy their own offerings to the Sun God, weakening his power and opening the way for the Dragon to rule all of Sol.

The story is heavily inspired by South American and East Asian myths explaining solar eclipses; in those stories, the sun disappeared from the sky because a Dragon had flown over and swallowed it! In many cases, the solution was a blood sacrifice to appease the great deity, but that felt a bit morbid for our game, so our players will just need to supply enough offerings to the Sun God to give him the strength to fight off the Dragon on his own.

We also started exploring the puzzle mechanic in more detail, so I created a few basic prototypes in Figma to illustrate what the puzzle UI and gameplay could look like:

Players must guess the correct card position after the row is shuffled

Players must move cards to correct the hieroglyphics equation

Players must order blocks to create three rows of the same symbols

It’s good practice, and I even tried out some of the puzzles in Protopie, which has a more sophisticated prototyping toolset, but as that was taking up too much of my resources I decided to stay with the simple versions as they conveyed the puzzles well enough.

I would really like to try prototyping these in Unity or Unreal, as those make more sense to learn for the future, but due to time constraints I will have to focus on improving that skillset during my final project instead.