EthereAlly is a 2D puzzle game that we developed in the game maker engine, It was our first game ever made. In EthereAlly you play as a Ghost that has been stuck in a dungeon for a long time, your only way out is by leading a human who is also trapped in the dungeon through all of the levels and have them open the door. One of the most unique aspects of EthereAlly is its movement, while the player has direct control over the ghost it can’t interact with any of the puzzle elements so instead you have to manoeuvre the human with the ghost to solve them.

I was responsible for creating the menu and a lot of the UI/UX design decisions. I also did a lot of work on designing the mechanics and the levels, specifically how they interact with eachother to create more complex obstacles. on the coding side of things i coded the menu and the way the game records your progress.

• Engine: Gamemaker
• Platform: PC
• Genres: 2D, Puzzle
• Team size: 4

Interesting design desisions

• Player movement
  • The goal of the movement was to enable us to implement interesting puzzle elements from co-op puzzle games into a singleplayer game
  • I worked to strike a balance between giving the player enough agency to prevent frustration and maintain the intended challenge of the game
• Puzzle mechanics and design
  • I designed many of the puzzle elements in combination with the movement system to make the most of its possebilities
  • The core design of these puzzle mechanics is to have the player make use of the evironment to move the human character around places that they cannot reach
  • This gameplay encouraged players to get creative and think ahead about how the human would interact with environmental elements and combine these interactions to achieve their goals

UI design and iteration

When it came to design the UI of the game we had one main goal we wanted to achieve, to smoothen the players flow into the gameplay and reduce guide them into playing the levels with as little time and effort spent on making choices as possible. My process for the design of the UI was done mostly in Figma to work out how the transistions and navigation had to work and the layout of the screens. this led to some of the most important things the design focused on:

• The game slowly reveals its levels to the player to prevent them being overwhelmed. I did this because players are likely to become discouraged from seeing loads of levels to complete especially when learning a new game. This is a technique applied by many games like Angry birds to improve the new player retention rate.

• Buttons And layouts were designed to reduce the players choice anxiety. This was done by Focusing the players attention on the elements that would lead them to playing the game and having the intuitive inputs lead them away from unwanted locations and actions.

Features i developed

• UI implementation
  • Imlementing the functionality of the menu buttons
  • Implementing the unlocking of levels based on the players progression
  • Implementing the visibility and accessabilty of content based on player progression
• Puzzle barrier obstacle
  • The puzzle element that i worked on implementing was a barrier that blocked the players ghost from entering an area until potentially deactivated
  • This mechanic was used to create different puzzles where the player would have to either set up the environment so that sending the human through the barrier achieved specific goal
  • Or could be used to make the player complete smaller puzzles to unlock areas of the level needed to complete a larger puzzle
• Inheritance
  • I worked on a lot of the Inheritance structure of the gameplay elements
  • Reduced the complexity and workload of adding gameplay

Skills and technology

• Gamemaker
• GML code
• Figma
• UI design
• Puzzle design