You can play it on your browser here: https://chimera-digital.itch.io/nellswindow
What is this?
Nell’s Window is a first person mini puzzle game created with a group of 7 for the 2024 New Year, New Skills Game Jam (https://itch.io/jam/new-year-new-skills-game-jam). The game involves you as a undersea explorer who comes across an abandoned underwater research station, where a mermaid named Nell is trapped inside. Where the player solves a couple of short puzzles to rescue the mermaid and win the game.
For this week-long jam I was primarily taking the role of a programmer, though also took the role as level designer when making the environments that the puzzles would be housed in (though didn’t design the puzzles themselves). This game was largely inspired by the design of escape rooms.
Initial Level Design
As per the tradition of week-long game jams (and game development generally), we massively overscored beyond our abilities!
Initially there were going to be 3 puzzles in the game. Where the player starts at the entrance of the facility (room a), would explore the environments leading up to Puzzle Room 1, getting a feeling of the atmosphere and reading through notes. This was done to satisfy a general want for the reveal of the mermaid to a ‘special moment’ in of itself. So the concept was to try and heighten the intrigue by prolonging the time it takes to meet the mermaid.
Upon meeting the mermaid and attempting to meet her, the doors would then close and the puzzles themselves begin in earnest.
Original Design Sketch of the rooms
The original Sketch modelled in Blender and imported into Unity
Iterations
As we were developing the game, the scope of the project was drastically reduced to meet the deadline. With that said I still made efforts for the layout to fit the design goals we initially set out. I argued that instead of recreating the level from scratch we could make use use of the top two rooms as shown below, and block off the rest of the original model, which drastically reduced the workload on modelling and implementing puzzle designs, which became a bottleneck.
finalised blockout of the environment design of the game
Finalised level enviroment design, after
Katherine Russell 