Wish You Were Here was another indie project I worked on as a game designer. The project was originally an attempt to participate in a game jam with the subject of "multiplayer games" by my friends and I. Knowing that today's multiplayer games tend to be fast-paced and action-based for the most part, we wanted to try something different, and we ended up with the idea of "Wish You Were Here". It is a co-op escape room game in which two players are left alone in two separate rooms, and they need to help each other escape their rooms by finding clues and solving the puzzles that are spread across the level environments.
The two levels of the game are rooms in an old abandoned building like the above. In each room, there are puzzles to be solved, and the clues for solving them are placed in the other room. The two players should communicate and help one another, using walkie talkies, in order to solve the puzzles and escape their rooms.
I designed several puzzles for this game with a focus on co-op play. Each puzzle contains some information and a riddle to be solved, making the players cooperate and help each other to solve them. In that matter, the players can interact with different objects (picking up, looking, placing) in their rooms, while with some of the objects, they can perform some unique context-sensitive interactions, which would help them solve the related puzzles.
Here you can see all of the puzzles in several self-explanatory photos:
I designed the puzzles with a setting-based approach. I imagined being in the game world, and then started to look around for different possible objects I might find. Then I played around with the objects a little bit to change them in a way that would create puzzles, and then I thought of possible solutions, designing and balancing them one by one. It was my first experience in designing puzzles, and I truly enjoyed the process while learning a lot of new things about designing puzzle games.
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