Wistful

Wistful is a 3D low-poly exploration puzzle game set against the suffocating void of space. Players control a child astronaut navigating atmospheric sci-fi environments, solving environmental puzzles to progress through interconnected levels.

Role

Gameplay Programmer (6-person team)

Contributions

Built core puzzle and interaction systems in C# within Unity
Collaborated on player movement, camera mechanics, and level design
Integrated environmental storytelling elements and gameplay feedback systems

Technical Challenges

Hand-rolled the first-person controller. Movement ran on a Rigidbody with mouse-look that clamped pitch to ±90° (Mathf.Clamp) so the camera couldn’t flip, a canMove gate for cutscenes and puzzles, and a respawn check - no third-party character asset, just direct input to physics.
Puzzle interactables through inheritance and Unity UI Toolkit. A base VaultDoor held the shared trigger and animation logic, and PasswordedVaultDoor subclassed it to pop a UIDocument-based password panel (TextField) on OnTriggerEnter - so a new puzzle was a subclass, not a rewrite.
Decoupled puzzle progression. Each puzzle emitted a completion signal that other systems could subscribe to, so new content could react to solved puzzles without hardcoding cross-dependencies between scenes.
Cross-scene save state. A lightweight store of solved-flags and triggered events was read on each level’s load, keeping level scenes independent while preserving puzzle continuity between them.

Lessons Learned

Working on a six-person team taught me to over-communicate on small decisions - a quick message saved hours of re-integration later.
Would invest earlier in shared tooling for level designers; even a small in-editor validator would have caught a few cross-level inconsistencies before playtest.

Recognition

Selected for presentation at the 2022 UTS Tech Festival.

Playable demo: itch.io · Source: GitHub