Game Overview

Garden of Táozi is a top-down puzzle game for kids that involves pushing around cubes to open new areas and collect items like peaches and lore scrolls. Collect all peaches in a level to win. The game’s narrative, lore, and look are based on the Chinese legend of Sun Wukong.

Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2946490/Garden_of_Tozi/

Development

My work on this game consisted of the following:

• Drawing out levels and puzzles for the final level.

• Discuss with team members the designs.

• Greyboxing the drawn out final selections.

• Decorating levels with Unity store assets.

• Keeping up with any Plastic project updates and making updates of my own.

The Idea: Take #1

Garden of Táozi is a project I joined midway through and because of that, I had a lot of material my team had already created for its levels I could look at. This served as my main inspiration to draw from when working on my own levels. The task given to me was specifically the final level of the game, and so I began working on a level idea that was pretty ambitious for me at the time. The level would have 2 floors and 3 puzzles to solve in total. The first 2 puzzles were near the entrance and involved the usual moving of blocks to reach the peach, but at a higher complexity than any previous level (with a chance to even straight up fail and lock yourself). I did it like this because it was the final level of the game and thus the stakes needed to be the highest they could be. I wanted the player to genuinely think about every move they could do with the blocks as if it could be their last. There was also the third puzzle and this one had an aspect of verticality to it. You needed to drop blocks down to a pit and those blocks would serve as a bridge to get to the peach. Once all peaches had been gathered, the gates in the middle would open and the player would be able to go to the tree in there and finish the game. As for the level’s looks, I unfortunately didn’t get any official assets to work with that would suit the castle-like aesthetic this take of the level was going for. I used Unity store assets to make an old castle courtyard-looking area with the gardens in the corners, tree in the middle, and rubble in the corners below the second floor.

The Idea: Take #2

Unfortunately, the lead of the project wasn’t satisfied with the first take. Because the game was for kids, they thought that original design was too complex for that audience and asked me to simplify things. That is how this design came to be. This level was a lot simpler in both layout and puzzles. Having only 2 medium-sized rooms and the 3 puzzles being next to each other while incorporating less blocks. The core idea is the same as before: pick up the 3 peaches to unlock the door and reach the tree. This take on the level didn’t get as far in development visually as the other one (it was also going to be in a old castle courtyard like the other one though). However, the design aspect did finish with me implementing all three puzzles. Just like in take #1, you can fail on these puzzles as well, but it’s harder to (you practically have to willingly fail for it to happen). Moreover, with less blocks, it is less complex to get to each peach. Overall, thanks to these 3 simplification changes (layout, fail states, and complexity), I managed to make the level a lot more friendly to a kids audience, and, while the level didn’t make it anyway because of lack of time, I was proud with the work I did.

The Lesson

I feel this was one of my more important times in growing as a game developer. This was the first time I worked on game for kids, and, because of that, it was also the first time I was told to completely change my philosophy for a level design in order to suit that audience. That was a real challenge, but, because of this experience, I feel I better understand how to envision how a different audience than me experiences games. It also helped me adapt my levels on the fly to suit those changes in audience. This project, even at its best, is far from perfect, in my opinion. Nowadays, I can critique and nitpick it a lot. If there was one big mistake I made, it was that verticality idea for the first take on the final level. It was too ambitious and genuinely poorly thought out design work (e.g. you’d have to go up and down the stairs a bunch of time for this puzzle to work). However, even through all of this, it is an important part of my history and I will always be happy of the fact I took part in it.