A brand new short adventure!

Type: Public prototype.

Genre: 3D puzzle platformer.

Engine: Unity.

Key Roles: Game and level designer, with minor coding.

Released: 11/08/2026.

Last updated: 11/08/2026.

Learned from: School of game design’s Unity 3D game kit (no code) level design.

Made by: Only myself while borrowing assets of the 3D game kit from Unity technologies. 

Before I tackle my next project which will be a commercial game, I was doing tutorials of the 3D game kit. I then decided to turn it into a short puzzle platformer which will exercise my game and level design skills while making puzzles with the prefabs already in the game kit.

Unlike Dragonscape and Industrial run, I made this game much shorter with only 3 levels in which 2 of the levels share the same map but positioned the Player differently.

Stranded on a mysterious planet with no signs of intelligent life anywhere. You see your spaceship up on floating islands with no idea how it got there.

Join Ellen on her adventure to venture through abandoned ruins, caustic tunnels, over a volcano and sky rocks while fighting hostile creatures, solving puzzles, making dangerous jumps and avoiding traps while on your way to your spaceship to fly back home.

Not many new things I learned at this time, but I did refine my game dev skills and worked around the assets I used to make a cohesive game. I have worked on this project for nearly 2 months. I wanted to make the levels interesting but done in as little time as possible like the caustic tunnel and rock-like platforms over a volcano.

Very little programming is done in this project. I used code to make the Main menu, expanded pause menu, ending scene and trigger boxes to take Player’s to the next level.

WHAT WENT WELL? 

•  I made some edits on the particles like smoke for the volcano and river fog to fit well with my scene.

•  I managed to make the 3D prefabs, sound, music, enemies, and etc to fit consistently in the scene really well. 

• I worked with most of the default prefabs, making as little changes to them as possible while making some prefab variants like the falling platforms.

WHAT I LEARNED?

•  I messed around with prefabs and their child LOD’s getting a better idea of how they work with different meshes, camera distance and how I may use them for my own future games.

•  I got a better idea of how lighting settings work with emissive textures without causing the project to crash, however my computer is newly advanced since I got it last year, so I may need to rethink how the settings will work with most players' computers.

•  I can make low poly ground terrain starting with pro builder mesh plane and easily adjust them very similar to the default starting terrain. Good idea for building ps1 styled levels!

• Tested a click-on-event which contains a text string you want written, when you click on the UI button (once referenced), the string value you gave it on the click event will display on the UI screen.

•  Tried out an Instance painter to paint plants into the scene.

•  I flexed my pro builder skills and made a shield for the playable character Ellen. It can be picked up by walking up to the shield which will use 3 public vector 3 variables of position, rotation, and scale with a target transform that will use the variables to attach to the Player characters arm, however it does not make any gameplay difference, it is purely cosmetic and is cut from the game.

•  Using a material intended for the skybox while making changes to sky and horizon colour, sun size, intensity falloff, and etc.

WHAT WENT WRONG, COULD I HAVE DONE BETTER?  

•  I didn't look too much on the documentation of the 3D game kit; I used its default level 1 and 2 scenes for references and e.gs of how the interactive prefabs work (like doors). I could have looked at the documentation, but I wanted to work through this as quickly as possible since it was made to be a short game.

•  Some assets like the floating rocks appear when the Player comes close to them, I should fiddle around more with the occlusion setting or its LOD's to make it consistent for the Players eyes.

•  I didn't plan the terrain map in advance to be part of 2 playable levels; I should have planned it in advance before starting to make terrain on the map.

•  Some 3D assets I put together like the huge stone walls (e.g. level 2) can be easily climbed on by the Player to get around acid pits without using the moving platformers due to them using multiple complex colliders, next time I should make a parent prefab with all the walls combined and only share one collider like I did for the walls in Dragonscape.

•  Next time I should use different prefabs for the final rock island that Ellen's spaceship is standing on. Its scale makes it have a poor texture. 

OVERALL

•  It was a good exercise, and it has become a walk in the park for me now. Very soon it will be time to start on my first commercial game and finally make a living on game development.

•  The prefabs with the 3D game kit gave me more of a better idea of how games are made regardless of if in Unity or Unreal. I definitely should look more into it to figure out how I can execute the 3D game kit inspiration into my own games like moving platforms, enemies, moving doors, etc.

Click here to play the game: Adam's Puzzle platformer by Adam House