Game Design Deep Dive: Crafting mystery through gameplay in Nauticrawl

▤ Summary

Check out earlier installments, including building an adaptive tech tree in Dawn of Man, achieving seamless branching in Watch Dogs 2’s Invasion of Privacy missions, and creating the intricate level design of Dishonored 2s Clockwork Mansion. Before finding myself back in full time indie game development, I took a long detour through the movie industry, working as a VFX tools dev and technical director. I will list some of the ingredients that are part of this weird recipe, how they interact with one another in a precarious balance, and I’ll try and sum it all up as an abstract formula that *maybe* could even be replicated to make different games. One pull of the designated lever and the machine will make a big metallic stomping sound, while the radar will show the map moving and the mug on the object-holder will start shaking to further amplify the illusion of motion. Nauticrawl pushes players into mysterious and uncharted territories of experimental gameplay and narrative design, but the reception has been incredibly heartwarming and showed there is plenty of room in this niche for more genre-defying content.

▦ Linked Companies

Lionhead Studios

$5M to $10M