Duration: 4 Months

Team Size: 1

Tools: Unreal Engine, Photoshop

Roles: Technical Designer

Quest For Valor is an action adventure and platforming game the features a plucky adventurer who is determined to reclaim money stolen from her village, only to discover a much larger threat lurking in the shadows  in the mine outside town.

Overview of Role

I was technical designer on this project, handling:     

-Landscape/Level Layout     

-Prop placement     

-Puzzle Design     

-VFX Design     

-AI states     

-Scripting

Design Specifics     

Village

I used village piece assets to build out the layout for the village, placing the buildings to create a "town center" atmosphere. This includes using splines with animations to move villagers around, a dialogue system to create text for the player to interact with the villagers, and building placement that directs the player to the correct locations for completing game objectives. After finishing the village, there was a little bit of spare time, so I added a hidden area for the player to find a collectable if they are inquisitive enough to look.      

The Mill

Mill area was hand build by me using static meshes and materials for the structure. This area was designed to challenge player usage of the movement mechanics in the game using jumping navigation. The player must climb to the roof and make their way through the smoke over the damaged rafters to get over a burned out hole in the floor. Consideration was paid to the "why" part of crossing over, as the player is collecting a line of gold coins as they progress through the game, and when they enter the mill another coin can be seen across the gap. The player is led to the staircase up to the rafters using an animated pig, and another collectable treasure is hidden here for players who explore the rooftop thoroughly.     

The Mine

This is the most interesting part of the game in my opinion, and the most design heavy part. I set up a dungeon wide puzzle of barrels and lamps, wherein barrels are either laid down or standing up next to doors and treasure chests, corresponding to the lamps in another room. If players match the on/off states of the lamps to the patterns of barrels laying around, then the doors and chests will be opened. I also had to use atmosphere effects to create a foggy/dim appearance for the entire dungeon. I scripted an event here for exiting the dungeon via collecting some dynamite and blowing up rubble to exit, enjoying a spline based minecart ride back to the Village.     

The Village (Return)

I set up the boss fight as a return to village, but on fire in order to save on asset production and layout design time. Here I set up an opening and closing cinematic to the fight using the Unreal Sequencer tool. This is a two enemy fight, with a wizard flying around the top, creating copies of itself over time to throw spells at the player. This puts them on an invisible timer for fighting the main boss, The Skeleton King, who is a melee based opponent. Using blackboard states and animation events, I set up the visual effects and attack animations for both enemies, as well as the AI to target the player and move enemies around the area. I scripted the flying mage boss with an explosive spell to create no go areas for player movement during the fight, and the Skeleton King can summon weaker skeleton minions as well as detonate an area around himself with telegraphing to force the player to engage with the movement effects

Project Takeaways

I had a few key takeaways from this project. As a solo project, I had to learn to adapt to not having other people to rely on. I had to learn to engage with several new systems in a short amount of time, including the animation event system, AI blackboards, soft referencing in visual scripting, and the Unreal VFX graph. I took away a lot of understanding of the different disciplines that others explore, and the thing I learned the most here I think would be a lot of new scripting tools and practices.

Duration: 2 Months

Team Size: 5

Tools: Unity, Photoshop, Maya

Roles: Technical Designer

Buster & Kit is a platforming adventure game about two intelligent animals, Buster (a red panda) and Kit (a lemur), on an adventure together to find a wishing well to make Kit taller. It features split character control, teleportation mechanics, and accurate platforming.

Overview of Role

I started out as a Level Designer on this project, but transitioned more into Technical Design as the project went on. I was in charge of:

 -Level layout     

-Prop Placement     

-Importing Assets     

-Animation Graphs     

-Pickups Placement

I additionally helped with:     

-Coding structure     

-Coding object interactions     

-Coding Player Movement and character swapping     

-Menu flow and transitions

Design Specifics

I was in charge of designing the layout for game which included the placement and height of elevators and making the jumping challenges interesting. I also designed the character swapping to interact with our teleportation mechanic, where the player can throw and gain control of the Kit(smaller character), and navigate them through the air. If Kit lands on one of the teleportation objects, it will move Buster (big character) to that location, and the player will regain control of Buster again. This ability can be chained so long as there are more teleportation objects to collect, allowing for a lot of freedom in designing hidden areas and high skill challenges.

Programming Specifics

I spent a lot of time on this project assisting with the coding side of everything, working with the programmer to follow good coding practices. I would help lay out frameworks for mechanics and prototype things out for him to save time. I also did a lot of work personally on the movement systems character swapping.

Project Takeaways 

This was my first team project as a designer, and I took away a lot about the unity engine, specifically it's strengths and weaknesses for the design profession. I spent a lot of time here learning how to fuse my workflow with my programmers and artists, and about their specific need from the design role.