Part of You is a comedy puzzle adventure game about finding your lost identity. The game is heavily inspired by the old school LucasArts point and click games from the 90s. My personal role on the team was a lot of different things: programmer, project manager, puzzle designer, & social media person. It’s been one of my favorite projects I’ve gotten to work on, turning somebody else’s vision into a reality, all while sprinkling my own flourishes throughout the identity of the project.
The core mechanic of the game is copying, pasting, and rearranging facial features from all the different characters to solve puzzles and alter their moods. As development went on, the focus of the game became taking this core idea and expanding it, giving players opportunities to use the tools and facial features in a variety of different ways to give players more freedom and new types of puzzles for them to solve. At it’s core though, the game is about players having fun with the toys that allow them to make goofy faces and interact with everything in the world, giving them a sense of discovery and ownership of the world. We really wanted the player to think “What if…” in every aspect of the game while still staying true to our adventure game roots.
At it’s core, the driving philosophy of Part of You was simple: make the toy fun. Inspired largely by the point and click adventure games made by Humongous Entertainment, the goal was to have every inch of the world be a new element players could interact with. Using their tools in unexpected ways and really making the small play environment we had come alive, jam packed with toys for players to have fun with and laugh about. Every time we came up with a toy we would design it for a variety of different use cases, from the most casual interactions to the more hardcore min-maxers.
BUILDING A PLAYGROUND
GETTING RID OF BARRIERS
As we worked on the game, we wanted to make sure that our thinking about adventure games wasn’t only rooted in the past. Conventions about what players are willing to put up with have changed wildly, in the last 20 years, most gamers have come to expect a little more guidance on the worlds they are diving into. Long gone are the days of needing to keep a pad of paper and a pen next to your keyboard as you traverse large unexplored worlds. Because so many of our key inspirations came from a time when this was still the expectation, we had to take extra special care to make sure players had enough guidance and didn’t feel abandoned by our game.