Tin Hearts is an award-winning puzzle adventure game made in Unity by the indie studio Rogue Sun and
published by Wired Productions, which released in April 2023 to highly positive critical reviews.
The game tells, over four acts, the emotional story of Victorian-era toymaker Albert Butterworth,
through the medium of over 50 Lemmings-style puzzles where the player guides a troop of tin soldiers
from the start of each level to the goal using various mechanics: balloons for flying, trampolines
for bouncing, and so on.
It is out on all platforms, including virtual reality headsets such as the Meta Quest.
I was hired on the project in June 2021, and was promoted from a junior to a mid-level designer in
November 2022.
What did I do?
I was primarily responsible for building levels (mainly in the game's particularly critically
acclaimed latter
half),
involving conceptualising and implementing innovative puzzles on a sliding scale of difficulty. This included set dressing the
levels with environment assets generated by the art team. My
favourite example, Level 43, is pictured below (click to zoom in).
I designed and implemented numerous in-level gameplay systems and features, using our Blueprints-style
visual scripting solution Playmaker. One example was the stamper, an in-level obstacle that crushes any
tin soldiers that pass through it, which I delivered from blocked-out prototype through to its creative brief for
art and code implementation.
I was keenly involved in the quality assurance process, being responsible for reviewing and feeding back
on both the creative brief and level and puzzle design work of other designers and approving it so it
could be merged back into our central repository.
I designed and implemented a number of the game's cutscenes for telegraphing key puzzle moments using
Cinemachine and Unity Animator.
I also got to do bits and pieces of environmental narrative design - letters hidden in the world, primarily.
