Linkito 2023
A puzzle game where you link blocks to make electricity flow.
Linkito is available on Steam
Team & Roles
Freelance Level Designer under the supervision of the vision owner, Kevin Sillam.
Software and tools
Built-in level editor, Illustrator, Notion
Context
Freelance mission, remote
Duration
One month, full-time
My work
As a puzzle designer :
- Create and iterate on various levels, from early game tutorials to endgame difficult puzzles.
- Find clever ways to use blocks to create new interesting puzzles.
- Make puzzles that allow players to stay creative when coming up with a solution, as Linkito is oriented as a sort of sandbox game.
- Create a fantasy around the levels, with the mechanics and the level art, to make the game feel less like "just a puzzle game" and add some narration and immersion to it.
- Suggest and help to create new blocks to add more variety to the systems and expand the campaign, like the bombs or the level selection map.
- Work tightly with the vision owner to come up with new ideas for the game, brainstorm on the puzzles and give regular feedbacks on the new blocks and the systems.
About the game
Linkito is an indie puzzle game about electricity, where you wire blocks to make current flow and activate various elements, from timers to LEDs, bombs, or even little robots. It helps understand the basics of electricity and logic, with classic AND, OR, XOR gates, switches, counters, delays, basic command blocks, and more.
Linkito is available on Steam since April 2023 (demo) and July 2024 (release).
Genre : Puzzle game
Players : Solo
Camera : Side view, static
Character : None, except through narration
Controller and support : PC, mouse
Target : Experienced puzzle enjoyers, familiar with Zachtronics games
Puzzle Design
As a freelance puzzle designer, I spent most of my time working on creating new puzzles for the game, while having regular meetings with Kevin Sillam, the vision owner, to share my work and give feedbacks on the game. My process included :
- Taking the time to try all the already existing levels, trying to grasp the vision of the game and how to levels were intentend to work.
- Making researches on some reference games given by Kevin Sillam, most notably Zachtronics' Opus Magnum.
- Quickly creating a lot of different small puzzles or groups of blocks to gather ideas, find the limits of the existing blocks, understand how some blocks really work, create new small systems.
- Starting to create bigger puzzles with a theme for each puzzle, focusing on specific blocks, or on a fantasy like bomb defusing or spies.
- Iterating on the existing puzzles with the feedbacks of Kevin Sillam.
- Starting the onboarding by creating specific puzzles that gradually add new blocks and mechanics.
Some challenges I had to face :
- Discovering a new genre, as I had never worked on puzzle games like that. It is also a difficult genre, as you cannot come up with puzzles that are more clever that you are yourself.
- Finding new ways to create interesting puzzles, which is easy at first but becomes more and more difficult as you create new puzzles.
- Add narration to the levels to not make it feel like "just a blank puzzle game". We decided to go with thematic levels, like defusing bombs, spying conversations, handling a robot factory, etc.
