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LIGHTS ORB

Platform : PC

OVERVIEW

Camera : 1st Person

Team size : 8

Period : October 2019 - April 2020

Rôles : Producer / Vision owner / Game designer

Genre : 3D Platformer

The project

Lights Orb is a fast paced 3D platformer with a first person camera, in which the player runs through a futurist city as fast as possible.

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By throwing and getting back his empowered Orb, he'll be able to activate mecanisms that block his progression to get to the end of the levels. The game is all about timing, running fast and finding different ways to improve his best time. 

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The game was released on February 5th 2021 on Steam.

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Organization

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  • ​Production planning

  • Playtest set up

  • Steam release

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Game design

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  • Controller design

  • Core systems design

  • Level design features

  • Documentation

  • Signs & feedback

  • Accessibility features

  • Playtest iteration

MY TASKS

The team

Programmers​

Game designers

Animator

MORE INFORMATION

Keeping it simple

As the game was a student project, one of our first design intentions was to focus on a simple design, which would allow us to iterate quickly and have, at the end of the year, a releasable game.

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The game is controller based : classic parkour with run, slide, jump, climb and throwing or getting back an empowered orb.

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Two states result from being with or without the orb :

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  • With orb : Character runs faster, jumps further but cannot climb.

  • Without orb : Character runs slower, doesn't jump as far but can climb.

Two activators

Receptacles and Antennas have their own color to recognize them. After using one of them the orb's color changes to adapt to the activator's.

Lights Orb is about being fast, and finding the "flow" that allows you to fly through the level as fast as possible.

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To reach this gameplay intention, we were inspired by Beat Saber (VR Game) : in this game, level designs are built in a way that you'll never be slicing cubes facing the same direction one after another. To be intuitive, each sequence uses your former arms position so you don't have to reposition them before slicing.

Looping actions

With this reference, we designed two ways of activing mecanisms : Throwing the orb on Receptacles or using the orb's impulsion (energy wave created from getting back the orb) to activate Antennas.

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With those two activators, we were able to recreate this Beat Saber flow we were inspired by.

 

The level design is sequenced with antennas and receptacles, which allow us to put adequate challenges using the current state the player is in :

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  • If the player doesn't have the orb, he can climb and the next activator will most of the time be an antenna.

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  • If the player has the orb, he's faster and can jump further, and the next activator will most of the time be a receptacle.

Assistance & accessibility

To smooth the experience in Lights Orb, aiming was simplified because the challenge it represents isn't relevant to the fast-paced game we wanted to create.

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Also, some features were added to the controller such as coyote time (late jump) or platforming adjusts (to prevent player from falling).

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The game's colors were chosen so everyone could see them. With cyan, yellow and pink, color-blindness cannot be a barrier to understanding signs & feedback.

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