I’d always felt my focus in games was on strong settings and surroundings, so it was a really interesting struggle to figure out what to do with a 3rd player game, where such a large part of the focus is on the appearance and abilities of the protagonist that’s perpetually near the center of the screen. I didn’t think I had the time to both create a compelling-looking character and an actual narrative environment, so I focused the game on the player (a cube) character’s ability to interact with the terrain to progress.
The idea I eventually settled on was a 2d side scroller, as it would be a bigger departure from my previous first person 3d games than a 3d 3rd person one. Because the first step in creating a 3rd person perspective was modifying the camera, I decided to have some fun with this new camera variability and construct levels with the illusion of different gravity directions. Getting the camera distance so that the character cube had an appropriate feeling of being lost in a large oppressive setting was especially difficult, but making everything extremely dark helped a lot. Based on these original decisions, I came up with the idea of letting the char be able to move along the “invisible” axis of depth, introducing the puzzle/navigation element of the game.
Overall, while I was happy with the initial idea I came up with, I feel that I definitely could’ve done way more with it. The first two levels really only introduced the ideas of nonstandard gravity and depth changing as tutorial levels, and only the 3rd level resembled anything of an actual level to work through. Even then, many parts of the level lacked coherent design, and you can pretty much just fall all the way to the bottom by just brainlessly alternating between the two degrees of depth every time you hit another wall. I definitely want to explore this idea in better depth in the future, and possibly include more degrees of depth for advanced difficult levels.