Pine Hearts
A cosy puzzle-adventure about love, growth and loss
SHIPPED · SWITCH, PC, iOS & ANDROID
· 🏆 2026 APPLE DESIGN AWARD (INCLUSIVITY)
Pine Hearts follows Tyke, a visitor to the Pine Hearts caravan park, on a gentle journey through memory and grief. I joined the project at Hyper Luminal Games in early production as a Junior Designer and worked through to ship, growing into a mid-level generalist role along the way. In 2025 the game came to iOS and Android via Secret Mode, and in 2026 it won the Apple Design Award for Inclusivity.
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Role: Game Designer (Junior → Mid)
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Studio: Hyper Luminal Games
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Engine & tools: Unity + proprietary visual scripting tools
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Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, iOS, Android Dates: Sep 2022 – Aug 2024
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My focus: Quest scripting, Level design, Systems documentation
What I did
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Scripted 3 of the game's 7 sub-regions — quests, interactions, and NPC encounters, built in the studio's proprietary visual scripting tools and iterated on internal and external playtest feedback.
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Owned the level design of 3 of 7 regions from blockout to final layout, and supported refinement passes across the rest.
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Authored and maintained the documentation for core mechanics and systems, keeping Art, Code, and UX aligned around design intent through to ship.
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Helped improve the tools themselves, partnering with the code team on usability changes that sped up content creation for the whole design team.
Deep Dive: How a quest got made
Every quest in my three sub-regions went through the same pipeline, from a one-line theme to shipped content. Here's the shape of it.
The brief:
Each sub-region arrived as a theme, say a caravan park plus a quota: so many primary, secondary, and tertiary quests.
Pitch double:
I designed twice as many high-level quest concepts as the quota asked for, then workshopped them with the other designers, iterating and refining until the strongest survived. Designing to be cut keeps you honest: every shipped quest beat an alternative.
Document for everyone:
Each surviving quest got full documentation — required assets, logic and system changes — written so Art, Code, and UX could see exactly what it needed from them before committing to it.
Greybox the logic first:
While Art and Code built the assets and systems, I built the complete quest logic in the proprietary visual scripting tool using greyboxes and debug text. That meant flow and pacing were playable and testable weeks before a single final asset existed — pacing problems are cheap to fix in greybox and expensive to fix in art.
The greenlight:
I presented the quests to the creative director and department leads, who pressure-tested feasibility and scope. Nothing entered production that a lead hadn't agreed was buildable.
Integrate, test, sign off:
Final models and animations were imported into the working logic, internal playtests drove a last round of iteration — placement, text, quest-flow tweaks — and a final cross-department meeting approved the sub-region for ship.
