Marbleground Construct is a colorful 3D puzzle platformer where you can place different objects into a playfield to help your marble reach the end of the level. Complete a set of pre-build puzzles or create your own path!

Project Specifics

Team Size:                     8 developers

Development:            8 weeks

Engine:                            Unreal Engine

Genre:                             Puzzle

Store:                              Itch.io

Release:                        June 2019

Platform:                     PC

Main Features:

  • Marble physics.
  • Difficulty-based objectives.
  • Movement altering objects.
  • Drag & drop inventory.
  • Interactable environment.

My Role(s):

  • Game Designer

Concepting and Brainstorming

  • Lead multiple brainstorming sessions with a multidisciplinary team and no starting constraints.
  • Creation of custom constraints to limit our action field and narrow our creativity efforts.
  • Diverging and converging towards a common middle ground.
  • Used sticky notes to record all the entries for a particular categoty.
  • Translated the session into a Trello board for future references.

Results:

  • Brainstorming sessions were key to give the entire team solid design and creative constraint to build the game upon.
  • These activities helped the team to bond together really early on and were the foundation of the team’s chemistry and final success.
  • Brainstorming sessions allowed other disciplines to share and get used to specific design terminologies.
Example of advanced brainstorm session

Puzzle Design

  • Created possible marble puzzles to be implemented in Unreal.
  • Used children building blocks to quickly create some puzzle ideas
  • Used SketchUp to give a virtual 3D shape to each puzzle.

Results:

  • Using real building blocks facilitate the  creative process and gave us a better understanding on how to properly use the space for this kind of puzzles.
Building Block Test
SketchUp Implementation

Focus Playtest

  • Organized a focus playtesting session with our target audience (kids from 6 to 11 years old).
  • Recorded data on their reactions (facial expressions) and level of enjoyment of the game.

Results:

  • We established that the game experience was extremely enjoyable for our target audience, even if in an unfinished state.
  • This experience confirmed to us that we were following the right “fun factors”.
  • We were able to determine what were the most enjoyable actions to perform (e.g. kids found it extremely fun to be able to destroy the playfield at the end).
Some moments of the Focus test session

Camera implementation

  • Implemented camera rails and cinematic camera shots to be triggered on play.
  • Added a script for the camera to auto-rotate after a certain amount of idle time.
  • Used Camera rig rails and cine camera actors to create and cut multiple shots together.

Results:

  • Cinematic camera intros gave a nice touch to the game. The players were able to scout the 3D space before the game even started and understand the key pieces to interact with.
Example of camera rails implemented in the scene