Do you ever face a nerve-wracking situation where you feel you just wanted to escape and be as light as a feather to float without a worry in the world?

Enter the life of a tired astronaut named Leon who lead a solitary life in his spacecraft in Weightless. While Leon seems to be fulfilling one of many people’s dreams including his own, he is slowly losing his utmost passion: space travel.

Weightless is a puzzle-based mobile game that challenges the player to take a different look in every perspective. The game is developed by a group of five aspiring Singaporean students from various tertiary institutions who called themselves as CUBIX.

Converging their love and appreciation for video games, the CUBIX team is led by producer and lead designer Muhammad Hazzry and its members: lead programmer See Wenhan, game programmer Kok Han Yi and two game artists Tai Jing Jie and Natasha Athalia Surya Chandra.

Weightless puts up a display of unconventional puzzle gameplay throughout Leon’s space journey of finding a habitable planet while rekindling his love for space. Whenever Leon encounters any obstacle, players require to manipulate an in-game slider, which is triggered by swiping your smartphone’s display from left to right and vice versa.

As seen in the trailer above, the swipe action causes players to see interchangeably between the two worlds of present-day and younger-Leon in order to achieve his definitive goal.

As life is inextricably woven by our actions in the past, the game employs the same concept, which revolves around our ability to perceive an object in more than a single way. For example, there are various different ways to look at a hexagon such as it can be the interior or the exterior of a cube.

Singapore Toy, Game and Comic Convention (STGCC) featured a condensed pop culture contents such as a variety of Singaporean-made games from indie to board games, art talks from industry expert,s and many more. During my visit at STGCC, I was able to get my hands on a brief demo of Weightless. At first, the game’s art and the environment felt akin to a mind-bending indie puzzle mobile game with the unique minimalistic art style, Monument Valley.

My train of thoughts was congruent with Han Yi, who was present at the booth during my Weightless demo testing. He said, “Weightless is inspired by the intricate visual style of Monument Valley but our game is not as hard as the game’s puzzles itself.”

Weightless’ acts selection

The puzzle stages in Weightless are presented as Leon travels through different kinds of planets and the side levels in each planet are branched out like Earth orbits the Sun. However, Weightless’ puzzle solving would definitely get the players to think in many dimensions.

It takes a little bit of practice time for the players to assimilate with the manipulation controls between Leon’s past and present to move and fill the platform space easily.

According to Hazzry, Weightless is designed to adapt towards an experiential game rather than a gruelling puzzle game as they aim to appeal to the casual mobile players who are in search for one-of-a-kind video game experience.

When asked about the main challenges in making the extraterrestrial puzzle game, the producer of the game said the five brains behind Weightless have no idea how to develop a puzzle game at first.

Hazzry confided, “Strangely enough, none of us are huge fans of puzzle games. We play puzzle games every now and then, but we wouldn’t consider it as our go-to genre. You can imagine the reservations that we had as we tried breaking down what makes a puzzle game enjoyable, its mechanics, appeal, and the structure of the puzzles themselves.

But collectively, we decided it would be best to step out of our comfort zones and try something new because that’s the best way to learn. So, we put our heads together, researched, brainstormed, and hence, Weightless was born.”

Their challenge proved to be worthy as the team won Best Game of Game Innovation Programme 2018, which is a 14-week game development internship program formed under Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) to foster innovative game creators in Singapore.

Players can view collectibles as presented on the left side of the picture to gain insight into Leon’s story.

In retrospect, Hazzry believes there is a blossoming future in Singaporean video game industry although he admitted that his parents were initially doubtful of his dreams to develop games for a living.

“The Singaporean game development industry is small and usually the average Singaporean is not familiar with what goes on in the local game industry (how it is like, how much money we can make, prospects, etc). However, after providing enough information, occasional convincing, and with proper planning in place, they eventually eased up and are now supportive of our decision,” said Hazzry.

He also expressed his hope to the Singaporean video game industry, “The local industry may be small, but it is definitely growing. We already have a handful of local indie games that are doing well on the global market. Hopefully, as the list grows, people young and old will be more receptive to the idea of joining the game development industry and the local game dev scene can grow as well.”

You can follow the chronicles of CUBIX team via their Tumblr here.