My responsibilities
In charge of planning character control mapping, as well as finetune them ingame.
Communicate and collaberate with art, sound, programming, and design on features for the game.
Perform player tests with QA team member and analyze results.
Find solutions to issues and bugs that surfaced.
Prototyping the level layout
Creating some of the visual effects for the game.
Design issue examples
Issue 1 - Controls
Result:
A control scheme that made sense based on how soon each element is needed ingame and was viewable via the menu.
Solution:
I tested different control setups and based on feedback decided on the one players found most intuitive
Problem:
Players were confused by the intial control setup
Issue 2 - Attachments
Result:
Better feedback to the player led to a smoother gameplay experience
Problem:
Players initially had difficulty remembering which attachment was active as soon as their character had picked up more than one.
Solution:
I worked with an artist and a coder to provide better feedback to the player via a UI element (lower left) as well as color match it to the attachment on the character
Issue 3 - Navigation
Result:
The visual indicator made moving around the ship more frictionless for the players. (Purple circle used to mark on the gif, the circle is not present ingame)
Problem:
Players got easily lost trying to figure out where to go on the spaceship
Solution:
I suggested 3 potential solutions for the team. UI map, an ingame element showing an overview of the ship, or a visual marker pointing towards next objective.
A few takeaways
The QA department is a game designers best friends. Having statistics backing an argument, makes it easier to convince others about needed changes.
When dealing with a game world that is different from our own, it is important to teach the players about the signage/symbols used. It is easy to get blinded by knowledge the team has from working on something over a period of time. The more strange it is, the more guidance is needed.
Test early, test often, never stop testing.
Getting to experiment more with VFX in this production too, increased my interest in adding VFX knowledge to my game designer toolbox.
Click here to read about the preproduction and production phases
The Preproduction Phase
Preproduction on this game was two weeks out of the 8 weeks of total production. During this phase, while we planned out the game and what the different departments were focused on, my job was to start up the design document and work with the other game and level designers on prototyping the overall design of what would later become the final spaceship setting for the game.
The above picture was the first step of planning the layout of the one world/level the game would have. We decided to keep this very simple and low-fi by using sticky notes with the room names, and in most cases the general shape we’d consider they might end up with. This allowed us to visually the layout and quickly make changes and discuss the advantages and disadvantages to each. This progressed into the next stage where we then tried creating spaceship shapes containing some of the different layouts we thought were the strongest contenders for our design and the narrative we wanted to tell.
Neither of these two designs made it into the final design as the art director came up with a third option that the lead group decided to go with. What it did do was help us decide which rooms were less critical to design and would require more work for lower benefit compared to the others.
This led to both the biodome and the canteen to be scrapped, but the rest of the room ideas did make it into the final design.
The Production Phase
The production phase itself lasted 6 weeks in total. As we went into this phase I kept track of gameplay issues that popped up and proposed solutions. Some of the more persistent ones was that a few visual designs had been made that did not communicate clearly to the players what they were meant to communicate. This was further supported by the results from the testing the QA department had run.
The solution was to do a few quick redesigns and test the response to them as soon as we were able to, which provided me the data to make a decision on which one to go with for the game.
As an aside from the game and level design parts, for the final version of the game I have a few different visual effects that I contributed with. Of the three most visible ones, the first is the figures on the menu screen that morphs as the player moves between the choices. I worked with a programmer on it, and I am proud that I managed to find a way to morph between more than three shapes, a thing VFXGraph was not set up to do at the time. I also contributed with the fires that spawn at some point during gameplay, which consist of three layers of effects, fire, smoke, and embers. Finally I created the forcefields that are visible in the hangar area of the ship.
Of the smaller effects, there are some sparks when the players character hits stuff at high speed or falls more than a certain distance and hits the ground.