Game
The Carver's Lament
Designing for touch meant the climbing and the sculpting had to share one input language, because a mobile player has no spare fingers for a second control scheme.
- C++
- Mobile
- Physics
- Touch Input
- 4Weeks
- MobileTarget platform
The Carver’s Lament is a meditative 3D puzzle platformer for mobile. You play a sculptor who carves mountains into monuments, and the story of who you are carving them for surfaces as you climb.
Climbing in three dimensions
The movement system lets you climb any surface of a mountain by connecting visible points, rather than following authored paths. On a phone that has to work from a single touch, so the system resolves what you meant from where you tapped and what is reachable from where you are.
Sculpting as the same gesture
Sculpting uses tap, trace and hold on the same surfaces you climb. Shaping the mountain reveals paths, which means carving is traversal rather than a separate mode you enter. That was the design goal and most of the implementation work: keeping one input vocabulary doing two jobs without either feeling compromised.
A 360 degree camera sits over both, which on mobile is a constraint as much as a feature. It has to stay readable while the player is dragging on the same screen it occupies.
Building to a device
We tested on real hardware throughout rather than in the editor, because physics based movement and a responsive UI behave differently once you are inside a phone’s thermal budget. The art direction is low poly with a soft piano score, which suits the tone and also suits the performance target.
Breakdown
