Nuclenoir

Nuclenoir started as first person simulation game. We had to recreate the experience of a nuclear power plant safety officer while also incorporating a gameplay/narrative twist. In the end, we landed on the idea that the player had to sabotage the power plant decyphering purposefully cryptic clues scattered around the control room. At this point we had an escape room, but something was missing: the spying and sabotaging just weren't felt enough. So we added a stealth element: a security camera that can blow your cover. Depending on the progress in the game when they get caught, players can discover different endings.

Roles

Puzzle Design

On this project, I was tasked with the creation of the puzzles. I aimed to include a mixture of creativity and logic-based puzzles, alternating between different difficulty levels to create a tense and release pace. In this role, I interacted extensively with the artists and the level designer to ensure that the relevant elements for the puzzles were in the right places. I often had to get very creative, writing rhymes, using secret codes, and hiding solutions in plain sight.

UX Design

Besides the hints, we had to guide players towards the puzzles, so a lot of UX was involved. Often we used the clues as a means to also guide the players while other times the puzzles themselves offered a hint.

In this project we had to create puzzles to place inside the control room of a nuclear power plant. All puzzles involved interacting with the machines in the control room to sabotage the power plant. After creating the puzzles we established the order in which they needed to be solved based on their difficulty. Now we had to place them in the room, trying to merge the stealth element and the puzzle element. We wanted the stealth experience to feel organic with the rest of the game, so we opted to separate the puzzles in 2 paths. This allowed the player to choose the puzzle to solve depending on the position of the security camera and the cover offered by the different machines. We created a diamond flowchart, where those paths converge in a single interaction and then diverge again. Each machine was associated with a single puzzle to avoid confusion.

Stealth & Puzzles

Guiding the Players

While working on the puzzles for this game, I tried hard to keep the difficulty low, because I knew that we didn't have a lot of time to playtest and that puzzle games are some of the hardest game to test and change. Little did we know that the main challenge of this game wasn’t solving the puzzles, but finding them in the environment, we worked hard on UX, animations, VFX, lights and written clues to guide the players around the room, iterating a lot and testing the game with many different players. We even decided to write on the machines the alphanumeric code we had used internally to communicate with the other members of the team. Furthermore we decided to keep all lights and machines turned off in half the room until the end of the first puzzle sequence, that was contained in the other half. Also, we provided players with a notebook to keep all clues at end.