Box Voyage is a puzzle-lite adventure game where you play as an overworked office worker that is being forced to take their government mandated vacation. Unfortunately for you, the company that you work for was too stingy to spring for a real vacation so you're getting a cruise ship in a box. The goal of the game is to explore the various rooms of the cruise ship and complete various different tasks to fill up your "FUN METER" and show your bosses that you are legally relaxed and rejuvenated enough to return to work. The game's interactions use a simple push, pull, and tap system that is operated with a cursor. All of the interactions in the game are meant to resemble analog toys such as wooden labyrinths or plastic water ring toys.
Platform: PC
Date: Spring 2020
Role: Lead Designer & Product Owner
Team Members: Dakota Williams, Jo Forchheimer, Walter Hill, Tim Carbone, Celina Tong, Garrett Harriman, Michelle Lee, Nicholas Eckstein, Vedant Chaudhari, Mitch Zasa, David Carolos, Alex Hubble, Brett Schwartz. Try it here: https://capturepointstone.itch.io/box-voyage
Now out on Steam!: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1286950/Box_Voyage/
Date: Spring 2020
Role: Lead Designer & Product Owner
Team Members: Dakota Williams, Jo Forchheimer, Walter Hill, Tim Carbone, Celina Tong, Garrett Harriman, Michelle Lee, Nicholas Eckstein, Vedant Chaudhari, Mitch Zasa, David Carolos, Alex Hubble, Brett Schwartz. Try it here: https://capturepointstone.itch.io/box-voyage
Now out on Steam!: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1286950/Box_Voyage/
During my time working on Box Voyage as the product owner and lead systems designer, I felt that it was important that every interaction in the game evoked some feeling of childhood wonder and discovery. One of the most important parts of the game are the interactions themselves which we decided to split up into two different categories, Productive Elements and Non Productive Elements. Productive elements being interactables that actively add to the the players overall progress in a particular puzzle. And Non Productive Elements being parts of the game that are inherently fun to interact with but do not progress the player in any way. One of the biggest design challenges was making sure that players didn't spend too much time trying to make progress using non productive elements. Through testing we found that having a simple checklist that hinted at the end goal of each puzzle was a great way to mitigate this issue.