Don't Shoot The prince

About

Dive into the warm winter boots of our Strong female protagonist while you traverse through the Kingdom of Phurian on your mission to rescue your younger brother who has gotten himself into trouble with the Kingdom’s Inventor.

This is a 3-week speed prototyping process that took place during my academic year, followed by a 2 week pre-production phase. It is a story-driven, third-person, physics-based archery game with a realistic art style and butter-smooth movement.

Primary Role:
Level designer

Secondary Role:
Game designer

Engine:
Unreal Engine 4

Team Size:
10

Duration:
5 weeks

Platform:
PC

Software’s used:

UE 4
Trello
Perforce

Main Responsibilities

Full ownership of all levels and design of the player progression/experience in order to connect the narrative with the world.
Research and apply design decision in a multidisciplinary environment during rapid prototyping
Deep dive into the game's backbone through various gym explorations and experimentations to find the fun
Maintain design documents such as game design macro and other documents during development

Navigators:

1. Concepting & Research

1. Since this is rapid prototyping, communication with the ART team was key, communicating ideas for the narrative, map layout and theme I did through sketches of gameplay moments and map ideas in alignment with the ART team’s vision.

Sketches and alignment

Onboarding ideas

2. Ideation on gameplay scenes and combat/traversal beats. A team-wide decision matrix on what visuals will the ammo mechanic have based on more of my sketches.

Gameplay scene ideas

City gameplay ideas

City gameplay ideas

Decision matrix on Ammo design

2. Gym Investigations

1. Before anything else, first comes a record of metrics and updating those metrics as development goes on. These are metrics of the main character.

2. These are metrics that keep track of enemy metrics in my enemy’s gym.

3. Because the gym is a place where the latest build can be tested, it is of great importance to me to keep it organized and presentable to other developers who want to play whatever is latest. The gym also uses a level streaming system to improve the performance of the gym.

3. Some scripting I did to record correct metrics for various movement combos as well as some gameplay moments showreel.
On top of that I made my own “how-to” document for future use. How-to Level streaming.pptx

3. Blockouts

Reference for the castle

The city like combat that I whiteboxed through the sketches I made while incorporating leashing elements and level readability elements

4. Documentation

For documentation we were tasked with preparing a game design macro for when the game enters it’s supposed Production phase. I researched various examples and used them to create these level overviews and filled in the information in collaboration with all disciplines.

Personal Post-Mortem

For a 3-week project we did quite a lot of work and I am happy with how it turned out. I definitely could have been faster with my blockouts but I spent a bit more time in the gyms than the actual levels. I learned the value of creating and working on a game design macro because it aligns the team with the vision of the game. Now I know that the game design macro chart is made by thinking through the experience flow of a game in detail and writing it down in a spreadsheet. This is the most difficult part of creating a game design macro and also the most valuable. It helps us to reach an agreement about what’s going in our game and is an important step toward bringing the scope of our project under control. IT’s essentilly an overview map of our game’s design that we can use to navigate through full production.