Leona's Shift

The game

Role: Lead game designer, 2D artist.

Leona's Shift was created within GGJ 2022,
and was awarded the 2nd place award for the local site's contest.

Leona's Shift is a puzzle platformer, which relies on puzzles and riddles to introduce new mechanics to the player which they will need to learn in order to finish the levels.

As the game designer, I wanted to make the players leave their comfort zone, and thus the answers for the game's riddles are on the keyboard itself.
For example, the first mechanic introduced in the game, the ability to shift between two worlds, can be activated when the player understands it can be accomplished with the "shift" key;
later in the game, the player learns that in order to control the gravity, they do so by pressing "ctrl".

The process

Under the restrictions of GGJ, time is of the essence.
Me and the rest of the team worked together closely

in order to make sure the design is one that we can

all achieve within the limited time frame.

Therefore, we took the GGJ's theme, dimensions,

and decided to create a platformer with a twist,

having the player change between two worlds

with different platforms in each.

When we understood our pace allowed us to add more to the game,
I designed and added further mechanics, like the gravity control mechanic.
I decided to increase the difficulty level by locking the commands to these mechanics behind riddles, which one could solve through looking at their keyboard.