This article is a re-upload of a post-mortem written in 2021 juste after the release of Another Marble.

Introduction

Another Marble was my graduation project. I worked on it during 9 months and the project released in July 2021. I was in charge of the game and the world design during all the development. In 2018, one of the members of the team made Marble, a short experience based on a physic mechanic. We were truly convinced by the concept and get the opportunity to remake the game in October 2020 for graduation. For me, it was an occasion to build a whole new world

Goals and objectives

• We named the movement mechanic "swoosh". That's the core of the game, a smooth never-ending motion. The flow and the pace of the game have to support that.

• The story takes place in a sort of dystopic future with sci-fi touch. We really need a strong appeal for the game. The aesthetic has to support the flow of the game.

• We really want a big scale for the world. The action takes place in space in middle of giants wandering ship junks. The narrative had to be some kind of space odyssey.

Add a new and fresh perspective

The first thing was to change the perspective of the game from 2D to 3D. The first Marble game had 3D graphics, but the movement was on a x and y axis only. With a third axis, the game got a serious glow-up. Adding some camera tweaks and we had many unique scenes and panoramas.

Designing the world

Now we can move and designing a path in a 3D world, we need to craft a whole world to explore. As I said, the world of Marble takes place in a dystopic future, after many years of space conquest. What we want, was to explore an “after humanity era”. Where the only thing humanity let behind, were junks that cannot just disappear. So the exploration takes place between massive and smaller objects and add a strong immersion.

Characters and Plot

For the plot, I really want to make a thing like “the plot of Marble Classic...but it not happen what you expect !!!”. So basically the tutorial sequence is a remake of the first game. We introduced to the player the concept of “Mission Marble”, a old human AI system still efficient, in charge of sorting and cleaning specific junks... But the mission failed !!! And so the marble that the player follows cannot returns to the main station. The avatar became unique with its broken wing and this is the start of a long journey. The story make emphasis on the marble loneliness.

HUB-Worlds are LIFE

It was a mess to determine the structure of the game. An opened-structure doesn’t fit well with a rail-guided gameplay like Another Marble. But we were scared that the game became repetitive with a linear structure. And the answer came to us with a 3-letters word : HUB.

Earlier in the project, the art team made a moodboard. It was a fake-timeline for our dystopia representing the evolution of humanity’s spaceships across time. We choose differents era for the areas of our in-game world. The most ancient is at the center, and areas from various eras orbit around.

After the tutorial sequence, the marble arrives to the hub area. At this point the player can explore others areas freely. It gives a better sense of presence and agency from that point.

Act on the world

The last thing I want for the narrative concerns the impact of the marble on the environment. Before that, the marble was simply flying around without any feedback. So the idea was simply to add differents feedbacks behind the marble path. I worked with the FX Artist of the team on something that could be interprets as a “marblish language”.

There are differents types of feedbacks following the context. With that the marble can connect differents objects around her. And so the feedbacks appears even at differents scales. It was really fun and useful at designing.