Shattered Legacy

The project was inspired by a student's M. F. A. thesis at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) examining the player behavior when faced with challenges. After 6 months of production, the team grew from one to 17 members and formed Meow Games Studio. Presenting you "Shattered Legacy".

Embark on an epic journey through a mystical world filled with puzzles and hidden treasures. As a brave adventurer, you must use your wit and skills to navigate challenging environments and uncover ancient secrets. With intuitive gameplay and stunning visuals, this adventure puzzle game offers hours of exciting challenges and discovery. Solve mind-bending puzzles, collect valuable artifacts, and unravel the mysteries of this enchanted world.

Art Areas

- Desert
- Cave
- Ancient City
- Magic Town
- Secret Chamber
- Seashore
- Sky City

Character

Holbein is a young adventurer who is full of curiosity about ancient treasures. The character concept is inspired from "Indiana Jones" and "Tomb Raider" series. He is confident, optimistic, and humorously stubborn.

Level Map

The whole world is divided into 7 art areas and 11 level areas with different environment styles and challenge themes. The non-linear level structure is designed to prevent players from getting stuck at a certain level. 

Items

When players encounter a new item, its functionalities and combinations will be introduced in the level loading scene.

Gameplay

The video below shows a 10-min gameplay of some levels from starting areas.

Helper Mode

We discovered that players are commonly stuck at certain levels of the game during playtesting. Then we iterated on all items and level layout initial encounters. In addition, we used the level name as a hint for each level. But this was not enough, as a result, we created a helper mode to totally fix the design challenge.

In helper mode, players are able to view the level's solution (level walkthrough). Players can pause, play, or even exit the helper mode to take over the state and continue playing.

Level Design Process

In the early stage, we used some placeholder assets to block out the level to test gameplay functionalities. At the same time, in-board assets were created and iterated for visual consistency. After we defined the gameplay layer information such as board size and terrain types, we started classifying levels into groups and working on art layers. Eventually, gameplay layer and art layer were merged together and put into overarching level map to test fluent player experience in terms of gameplay and art.

We created a level editing tool which enabled us to set item and grid properties to preview effects in the editor without running the game. This helped us to streamline our level design process.

Level Editor

We built an in-game level editor for players to design their own levels and share them with others.

Credits

Producer
      + Xiangyu Wu
      + Vishal Venkat
Game Designer
      + Xiangyu Wu
      + Xuanwen Chen
      + Ruicheng Jin
Level Designer
      + Xiangyu Wu
      + Vishal Venkat
Programmer
      + Xiangyu Wu
Technical Artist
      + Xuanwen Chen
      + Zihan Liang
2D Artist
      + Yang Peng
      + Haoran Zhang
      + Yuan Su
      + Jingrao Guo
      + Rivai Li
3D Env & Prop Artist
      + Xuanwen Chen
      + Junxiong Ye
      + Zhengda Li
      + Yi Fu
3D Character Artist
      + Xuanwen Chen
      + Zikun Cheng
Lighting & VFX Artist
      + Xuanwen Chen
Audio Designer
      + Wenzhe Xiao
Social Media Manager
      + Vishal Venkat
Website Designer
      + Runhao Chao
QA Tester
      + Phani Teja Koti
      + Qunxiong Zeng
      + Ruicheng Jin