The Automatician
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1st Person Puzzle Exploration Game
1 Academic Year
Concept Designer & Co-Founder
±30
Released for PC
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About the Project
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The goal of this project was to create a challenging puzzle game in a visually appealing and relaxing environment to explore and discover.
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Having known and loved The Incredible Machine from our own childhoods, we aimed to reward the players with their own animated 3D Rube Goldberg Machines.
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Navigate through a beautiful Victorian Mansion
Help the Whodos in the Mansion by doing Quests
Discover what happened in this mysterious place
Navigate through a beautiful Victorian Mansion
The player is challenged to build these machines with parts they find in the mansion in order to overcome obstacles and proceed through the game and become the next Automatician!
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My Role and Responsibilities
The Incredible Machine - (1993, Dynamix)
- A great source of inspiration for The Automatician
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In order to recruit a team of qualified team members, coming up with a strong concept that people believed in was crucial to getting the project on its feet.
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Along with the other Founders of DreamPunks, I came up with the game concept for the Automatician. Combining the idea of creating Rube Goldberg machines with a 3D environment that you could freely navigate through and investigate as a player.
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The idea to use hexagonal tiles and pre-made machine parts to connect across them allowed us to create enticing animations for the machines with a lot of opportunity to play around with the puzzle difficulty.
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Other than that, my main responsibilities for this project lied with overseeing its development and nurture it towards its release, along with the other founders.
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Key Lessons Learned
Seeing as how The Automatician and The Adamant were simultaneously developed under Dreampunks, the most difficult task for me was trying to find a balance in dividing my time and effort across the two projects.
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Both projects had proved themselves to be high in potential and, having (co-)designed both game concepts, it was a little as if I had to choose between raising one of my two 'children'. Thankfully, I had the other co-founders of Dreampunks to count on and help carry the weight.
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In a sense, the most important lesson I have learned through the development of the Automatician is how to take a step back and trust other team members to take care of an idea and raise it toward its full potential. By doing so, I was able to concentrate on the development of The Adamant more extensively, while still keeping a helicopter-view on The Automatician's progress and providing feedback for its course of development.
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The necessary steps we had to take to get the game released successfully came with a lot of new challenges. Because of this project, I was able to gain experience with things like marketing strategies and business models, fund allocations and release procedures. Basically everything outside of the game's development.
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Looking back at it, I am very proud to see this game being released on Steam and very thankful for everyone who contributed to make it a reality.
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