Gloom Box is a 2D musical puzzle-platformer. The game follows Muse as she explores a musical world. Muse is accompanied by her sentient boombox named Gloom, who enables Muse to play cassette tapes to influence her surroundings. Each cassette tape represents a different genre of music and ability. These musical abilities can be mashed up to create different effects.

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Third place winner in RPI's 2017 Game Fest

Roles: Lead Audio Designer, Game Designer, User Researcher, Programmer

The mechanics in Gloom Box are inspired by music genres. There are three core abilities. These are choral, heavy metal, and blues. This photo depicts the heavy metal ability in use. Players can use this ability to make monsters heavier and weigh down objects like buttons. Choral makes non-playable characters (NPCS) bouncy and blues makes NPCS cry, thereby producing water.

Players can also mashup abilities to combine effects. For example, a heavy metal and choral mashup reverses gravity. Players can only mash up 2 abilities at a time, we found this to be complex enough for the number of interactions we wanted to include in this game.

User research for this game took the form of bi-weekly playtests. During these playtests we utilized game user research methods such as the talk aloud principle, direct observation, retrospective testing, semi-structured interviews, and surveys. We used our findings to inform our design. See more here.

One example of a change we made due to our playtests was the use of color to reinforce ability associations. The area of effect (AOE) circle above is purple because the player is using a mashup of blues (represented by blue) and heavy metal (represented by red). This also gave our game more accessibility to those who are hearing impaired. 

This complexity map depicts a web of all interactions available in Gloom Box.