Glitchescape
A Jigsaw Puzzle-solving Narrative -Rich Game
GAME DESIGNER | PROGRAMMER | ARTIST
Dec 2023
Made with Unity
NARRATIVE DESIGN
Since this is a plot-oriented game, when brainstorming, we started with a plot design perspective for game design.
The theme of the game is about artificial intelligence paintings. The story takes place in an online art gallery called the CyberLouvre, which showcases AI-generated art. Players assume the role of a special visitor who is asked to help the AI curator PSI solve a hacking incident. Through puzzle-solving, players remove glitchy pixels from the original artwork to restore it to its original state.
During the process, the identity of the hacker gradually emerges: her name is NOLE, and she is a mirror model trained with the same dataset as PSI. She disagrees with the current AI's method of creating art by mimicking human techniques and was consequently eliminated. This prank is her attempt to awaken her twin, PSI, who is responsible for judging AI-generated artwork. Players must make a choice in the final puzzle: collaborate with NOLE to hold an exhibition of glitchy art or maintain the status quo to ensure PSI keeps her position as the gallery's host.
GAMEPLAY DESIGN
Gameplay Design
In each level, the player is going to restore a painting that is full of glitches created by Nole. The player can drag and drop the restoring tiles on the right of the screen on the glitches to fix them. If any of the pixel of a tile overlaps a glitched pixel on the painting, the glitched pixel will be fixed. However, if it overlaps a non-glitched pixel on the painting, it will be changed to glitched pixel. The player must use these limited tiles to cover up all the pixels that are ruined by Nole to restore the painting.
Fixing Glitches
By applying the same mechanism with varying complexity, the game creates puzzles of different difficulty levels, allowing players to experience appropriate challenges and a sense of achievement as they progress from learning to mastery.
Another important mechanism the player should deal with the during dialogue choosing, when they choose diffrent dialogue options, there will be different branches and the player can receive different amount of HINT POINTS for the player to right click on a tile to see the correct position that it should be put at.
Hint
In the final level, the player can either fix the glitches as he or she did in the past levels, or turn all the painting into glitches to reach different game endings.
PROGRAMMING
Since I am the only programmer in the team, and it is a level-based game, I designed and developed a workflow for the teammembers to follow so that it would be easy to create and change the levels.
First, the level designer can create a configuration to use 3 images to show how the painting looks like and where the glitch is, and also a bunch of parameters to set up the pixel-based painting in a level.
Level Config
Then, the designer can drag the config to a tool I developed and then just click Generate Image, a level is done.
Image Generator
Also, a Recovering Tile Generator is made to create the recovering jigsaw tiles easily.
Recovering Tile Generator
Besides this, a dialogue system is created for the narrative designers to easily change the dialogue options and branches. All these tools together greatly optimized the development efficiency.
RESULT
Because the workflow and tools are reasonably made, we had a lot of time to change the levels, narrative, and dialogues, which made the game one of the best by the end of the semester.
Here is a trailer of the game.
Glitchescape Trailer