Trial Of Odin

Concept

Trial of Odin is a 3D puzzle game where you control a female seer known as a "Vala" equipped with a magic ability allowing her to put objects into stasis, causing them to float mid-air while being freezed in time. This is the core mechanic of the game and is key of solving all of the puzzles present in the game.

Engine: Tengine
Platform: PC
Team: 13 People
Duration: 9 Weeks
Method: SCRUM
Location: PlaygroundSquad
Official Page: Click Here>>

Background

This game was made as part of the educational program of PlaygroundSquad (A Higher Vocational Education), using the in-house engine known as Tengine, developed by Tension Graphics. We had a total of 9 weeks and were 11 students working on this project, with the addition of our sound and music team, which consisted of 2 people. Credit list can be found further down this page.

My role for this project was as a designer where I had the following tasks and responsibilities:

Gameplay/Level/Puzzle Design
Scripting/Tweaking (INI)
Quality Assurance
Greyboxing (Autodesk Maya)
GDD Documentation
Project Management
UI/UX Design

Click to see the GDD of this project

The Process

Our level layout was heavily altered throughout the course of the project and initially consisted of 10 puzzle rooms which amounted to 17 areas in total with the non-puzzle rooms included. Although in the end, we settled for 6 puzzle rooms with 10 areas in total, which we did in favor of prioritizing quality over quantity, considering the time constraints we had.

By doing this, we designers had more time to playtest the puzzles, while the artists could spend more time on each room to give every room a special look and feel.

The picture to the left displays the level layout which we ended up using in the final version of the game. However, after having the fundamental versions of the puzzles established, we made some subtle changes to the puzzles to make them coherent and feel as good as possible to the player.

Nearing the end of the project, it was only the last puzzle that we had to alter completely since it turned out to be way too complex to integrate into the game, given the shortage of time we had left. Making a much simpler puzzle without any enemies gave us more time to playtest and polish the final puzzle without needing to worry about the behaviour of the enemy AI, which would have amounted to more work if we had decided to keep the complex puzzle to use as our final one instead. the puzzle layout of the last puzzle can be seen in the upper right corner of the picture depicted above, and was called the "Cross-Button Room".

We had a lot of puzzle ideas and those we liked we put into an Adobe Illustrator file, where we could try out the puzzles before making a greybox version out of them. It was a very quick and easy way of prototyping puzzles. I personally preferred drawing out the puzzles on pen and paper first, though.

Below is a full playthrough, which displays all areas and puzzles in the game.

Credits

Art: Axel Kloo, Mohsen Zahmatkesh, Adam Forsberg, Adam Dencker, Lucaz Flodemark, Jonatan Henriksson

Programming: Agnes Aspgren, Fabian Fernlund, Alex Mattila

Design: Samuel Kärvemo, Josefin Martinsson

Music/Sound: Douglas Brihed, Daniel Joona Bergström