Escape the Aurora

About the project

Escape the Aurora is a first person Unreal Engine puzzle horror game produced by the graduating class before me in 2020. The game takes place in a dilapidated space ship where an alien monster stalks the halls looking for the player. To proceed through the ship, reach the helm, and escape the player must complete a series of puzzles to restore power and open doors.

My Role

As an Intern on the team my roll was to assist with game design issues and shadow the project managers so as to be prepared to take a leadership roll in the next years capstone project. While on the team my most notable task was the puzzle design for the falling block style puzzles that made up the games primary gameplay loop.

the format

The interactable puzzle piece is a 1X2 block that can stand or lie on a grid. The player interacts with the Key Block by pushing it over from one of the cardinal directions. The solution to each puzzle is to navigate the Key Block into the Hole(Goal) at the end of the course, thus unlocking the next area of the ship

the Theory

The actual difficulty of the puzzle element comes from the way the courses are shaped. By building the courses in such a way that there are a limited number of correct ways to push the block to the finish difficulty is created. If there is only a single path the player can take to reach the Goal and there are no possible ways the player could make a mistake then you could say that the course has a difficulty factor of 1. If there are 2 paths the player could take but only one of them leads to the Goal then the Factor would be 2. This method of quantifying difficulty gets more complex exponentially as the open spaces to move the Key Block open up in all four directions. Players given an open space could loop endlessly in circles for hours, this also must be thought of when considering the potential difficulty of a course design.

the plan

When planning the puzzle difficulty for the game we made the decision to go with a linear difficulty curve starting at 1 and increasing by 2 every puzzle. This decision was informed by the fact that we wanted to achieve a 100% completion rate. Our target audience for this game was our fellow students and we wanted them to be able to experience the game in its entirety in just a few minutes. As the puzzle designer I set out to create multiple options for each potential level of difficulty listing the pros and cons of each design. Working within the constraints of the space ship layout I tried to design puzzles that were visually interesting and at later stages even intimidating but were actually deceptively easy.

the method

The puzzle diagram I came up with was a grid with colored squares representing possible spaces the Key block could move to. The colors represented whether the Key could reach that block in a standing or lying position and also whether that block was necessary to traverse as part of the solution to the puzzle. using this system I was able to map out every possible way a person could conceivably traverse the Block. That data led to each puzzle being given a difficulty factor, and these factors as well as whether or not the course was visually interesting led to decisions being made about which puzzle to use for each section of the ship.