This Monument Valley Clone Level is a work in progress project I am currently designing. The project is made in Unity and I have personally created everything in this game apart from the water shader. I modelled all of the assets used and created my own shader to allow the blocks to have the vibrant colours you see above. Above is a video walkthrough of the level and below are more detailed screenshots of the different rooms. The focus of this project is the level design, with the aim of making engaging and beautiful levels similar to those of the original game.
I also entirely programmed this game, which includes the navigation system. The player clicks on a block and the character has to path-find a route there. Due to the optical illusion mechanics in the game it would have been ineffective to use Unity's inbuilt Navmesh system, and so I created my own simple pathfinding algorithm. Each block has a list of neighbours the player can move to - including blocks that only appear to be next to each other because of the orthographic view. By taking the distance between the players current block and the next target block, the character can calculate the speed it needs to move to keep the velocity on the screen looking constant. This allows the character to move to disconnected blocks smoothly.
Designing for an optical illusion gave way to an interesting set of challenges and forced me to think about the design of the level from many different perspectives. Using different camera layers and other tricks allow the whole level to look as clean as they do. The other mechanics such as buttons, rotating blocks, draggable blocks and doorways all add to the possibilities of level design, but each came with their own programming challenges. As the project has progressed I have managed to fix these issues as they arise and this hands on perspective gave me more ideas for puzzles.
Above are some of the earlier grey box level ideas. These have changed quite a lot through iteration and playtesting into the more polished levels seen in the video. A big piece of feedback that I got when play testing these early grey boxes was a feeling of disconnection between the rooms. This inspired the idea of the Lighthouse, which acts as a hub for the level. After completing each room the player returns to the Lighthouse and is able to progress further.
Below is the PDF of my Level Design Document for this project, including the inspiration and design process I went through.