In Land of Lights, you command your lizard companion, Guppy, to shift the terrain by giving and taking a light resource, Luster, from objects. To allow the player to do this, we needed a system for Luster to easily travel between Guppy and other objects. We also needed it to work for most of our puzzles, while being simple to use for the player.
Originally, I was considering a dynamic system where the player could give or take as much light as was needed. However, after discussing with the rest of the developers, we agreed to keep it simple to minimize problems with making and balancing a dynamic system. We decided to use a segment system to keep the results predictable and from there, we designed it so Luster was divided up between evenly sized segments.
We made a component, using Unreal Engine’s actor components, that could be attached to objects we want the player to interact with. The component is designed to both trigger events in the object based on the current amount of Luster, and it is also able to affect how the selected object visually looks. If you take Luster from the object, it will visually get dimmer as you take more, and the reverse is true as well. Some objects however didn’t need more than an “on” and “off,” so we also made another, simpler, binary component that does just that.
When designing the objects themselves, the first step was figuring out what we wanted each to do. We made it so some objects simply grow and shrink in size, while other objects would rotate on an axis by fixed amounts. All of this was a lot harder to implement than expected, we initially had all the adjustments tied to animations, but something in the process caused things to break in an earlier build. There would also be a problem where two objects with a similar action, rotating, needed to be specifically designed separately with their own UE blueprints. To rectify this, we redesigned objects to be more directly affected by the components and made it easier to replace models and add further components when necessary.
In the end I hope that the systems we made for Land of Lights can allow the player a simple but fun puzzle game experience that could be played and enjoyed by people of all ages.