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Cavern Crafters: Homebound, is a whimsical puzzle-based RPG designed to rekindle the joy of adventures and exploration in players of all ages. Players are immersed in a vibrant underground world, where they find their way home through puzzles and collecting items. We combine traditional elements of RPGs with engaging puzzles to create a gameplay experience interwoven with the game’s narrative.
Scope: Game Design Course Tools: Godot, Clip Studio Paint, After Effects
Duration: 5 weeks Role: Developer, Artist, Project Manager
Artist Statement:
Our goal with this game was to build an exciting and magical world, where players directly interact with characters and aspects of the environment, and are brought closer to their goal with each puzzle and item collection. Through intuitive gameplay, carefully designed puzzles, and whimsical visuals, this game was intentionally designed for players to enjoy the sense of challenge in solving puzzles, whose difficulty increases as the game progresses. We want our players to tap into their love of exploration by navigating the rooms of the underground cave, immersing themselves fully through both visual and auditory ambiance. Through the narrative woven into the game’s mechanics, we wanted players to feel a sense of accomplishment as they complete their item collection tasks and navigate through puzzles, with the help of characters like Squeaks and Whiskers to find their way home.
Consequently, Cavern Crafters: Homebound, employs the thrill of exploration coupled with the satisfaction of solving puzzles to contribute to a grander narrative. This game serves as a means for players to dive into a new and mystical world, where each new discovery fuels the excitement of finding one’s way home.
Game Model:
Minimum Viable Product (MVP):
The combination of immovable and moveable objects in the map provide the player with a navigation conflict that they must resolve to make it to the next puzzle level and acquire the next key item to build a hot air balloon to return back home. The immovable crystals, rocks, and water bodies throughout the dungeons all block the player’s path so that they must plan their movements to mine collectible items or hidden keys. Each dungeon level has a distinct style theme, layout, and secondary objectives which helps construct a discovery aesthetic as they explore every hidden room and a sensation aesthetic as they indulge in our 8-bit retro art style. Overall, we attempted to build the following aesthetics in our MVP: sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge, discovery, and submission.
Ideation:
Initially, we wanted to incorporate a magic-based, rogue-like, dungeon crawler experience, where they would need to choose the right combination of elemental spells to maximize the effectiveness of their attack strategy, introducing a spell choice and boss special move dynamic to the gameplay. Our gameplay will primarily have a 2D overhead perspective. This game is intended for players ages 8+. It would offer a player v. game mechanic. We envision people from all backgrounds to be able to immerse themselves in our fantasy world.
Testing and Iteration History:
For our initial prototypes, we implemented a Python script where players could run the puzzles through the Terminal and use arrow keys to move boulders around on a 12×7 grid. We wanted to see whether this kind of puzzle felt intuitive and challenging while still being fun. We had three puzzles total, an easy, medium, and hard one. When playtesting, we were particularly looking for how long each puzzle took and whether they felt challenging without being too frustrating. Players used arrow keys to move and could press “r” to reset the puzzle and “z” to undo one step. For our first playtest, we had three different people test the three different puzzles, because we were trying to get as many perspectives as possible.
Since most of our play testers seemed satisfied with the experience and difficulty levels of our puzzles, we wanted to playtest how the puzzles would feel in our actual game environment. We started with some initial rendering of our puzzles using Godot 4, and wanted to get player feedback on whether the player movement and mechanics were intuitive in the context of the puzzles. We also wanted to see whether the level of challenge would change since the grid-layout wouldn’t be visible and there would be more visual stimulation, which could affect the experience.
Generally, the overall player movement seemed intuitive, but there was more confusion when it came to what spaces the player could fit inside and how to maneuver the boulder around, because they weren’t snapping to each pixel anymore. There were times when a player expected that they could fit in between the boulder and a rock, only to be blocked by the collision shapes (see below video 0:13). I think this caused some unintended frustration, and was a signal for us to match the collisions more closely to the visuals so that players aren’t getting confused. Out of three playtests, two players said the difficulty curve felt reasonable and one player mentioned that the third puzzle seemed a little too hard compared to the other two. I think this sentiment may have been due to the fact that there were many times in her playtest where this issue of the collisions came up, and she had to restart in order to proceed, which made the puzzle feel more frustrating.
With improved collisions, we decided to playtest our puzzles again, this time including audio as well as an explanation of the narrative. We found that the difficulty curve of our puzzles improved and players expressed less frustration since the collisions now matched the visuals of the game better. Players also liked the audio and thought it fit well with the theme of the game. When it comes to the narrative, since we were explaining the narrative out loud and players didn’t get to see how the key items fit into the game, I think they were a little confused by the relevance of the story to the game. Moving forward, we wanted to make sure that the items and mechanics made sense to both the gameplay and the narrative, and that the purpose of the different items were motivated correctly
Conclusion:
We were able to create an application that engaged players in fun and whimsy, but also uses puzzles to create an interesting challenge. We worked to balance intuition and challenge through our puzzles, and created a fantastical aesthetic for our players to enjor.
Although we were constrained by the time frame of the project (5 weeks), we were satisfied with the progress we were able to make with our application. We were able to build a functional, intuitive game, with interactivity with game characters, solvable puzzles, and whimsical animations. It was a fun and enjoyable process to find creative ways to create play, and utilize design processes and player feedback to continuously improve our game.
Cavern Crafters: Homebound was a wonderful opportunity to incorporate player research, creativity, and game design concepts to create a fun and engaging game. I will continue working to center user experiences, intuitivity, and creativity as a designer.
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