Karn Bianco

Harmonia

C# prototype for a wee asynchronous co-operative puzzle game.

Harmonia was designed to be an asynchronous co-operative game for the Xbox 360 in which an experienced videogame player could support a less experienced player who was at the center of the gameplay experience.

The novice player’s role is to physically interact with puzzle tiles that make up the world around him or her in order to solve puzzles and earn points, while the experienced player provides assistance.

No simplistic 2D puzzle game with cutesy visuals (provided by Lost Garden, by the way) would be complete without an exhaustively extraneous plot, though, so I shan’t disappoint:

Harmonia is a luscious world inhabited by a populace – known as the Harmonians – who live exclusively on floating islands in the sky. These islands are kept afloat by the miraculous properties of an enigmatic mineral known as ‘Harmonium’.

‘Harmonium’ grows naturally in the ground – which is fortuitous, because the ground would crash into the oceans below without it – but the Harmonians also harvest it for various applications, technological and otherwise, that shan’t be discussed here.

When a Harmonian comes of age, he or she is assigned a mentor whose job it is to instruct in the ways of ‘Harmonium’ harvesting an ancient, if slightly bizarre and archaic, tradition that is somewhat comparable to tilling soil, only with more ‘flipping’.

In the name of education, however, the mentor must not personally perform any harvesting. Instead, the mentor can only guide their pupil – helping them navigate the expansive lands of Harmonia, and undoing their inevitable mistakes when necessary.

Harmonia was created as a solo project using C# and XNA (with XML used for saving/loading).