My responsibilities
Create the core loop.
Communicate and collaberate with art, sound, programming, and design on features for the game.
Testing the main controls of the player character.
Prototyping the level layout
Creating simple VFX
Summary
Totally Accurate Warehouse Simulator (T.A.W.S) is an action job simulator that allows the player to experience the joy of doing repetitive work under the stress of time pressure and under the watchful eye of a demanding boss.
In T.A.W.S. we built upon some of the lessons we learned during the extremely time-limited production of The Amazing Puppet Show. I knew we had something fun with the weird and wonky movement system and wanted to carry that knowledge with us into this game. From a game design standpoint this meant exploring how to transfer the puppetlike movement system which lead us to the creation of the robot the player controls in this game, as I figured that a robot is basically just an advanced form of puppet. As game designer on this project, due to the limited timeframe, my main focus was to come up with a core loop that everything else could be built around and then suggest features that could help enhance the setting and experience. For the level design we decided to keep the same type of constraint we had in The Amazing Puppet Show, as this helped keep the scope limited as we knew we only had a few days extra to work with.
Some of the issues we ran into were as follows:
To begin with, our design for the logo was a bit too close to a certain other warehouse style company. After some communication with the legal experts at DADIU, we were advised to make some smaller changes to separate it a bit more visually.
How to increase difficulty without making things too difficult? Due to this being another short timeframe production, we again had to rely on mostly internal testing and for this one I do think we overtuned the difficulty and made it a bit too hard overall. It’s doable to complete all levels, but you have to be used to the controls and consider smart use of the conveyor belt to make it in the last level. Or get very lucky with the packaging orders.
Making the controls more intuitive. Since we built upon the control sceme we had used in The Amazing Puppet Show, this become a more complex version of that movement system.
A few takeaways
Controls need to be settled upon earlier in the production, and once locked down there has to be very good reasons before a change is implemented. In a more regular production, get this settled during pre-production so everyone knows the limitations and possibilities going into the production.
I had done it before during course project productions at ITU, but this was the first production where we got to play around with putting ‘life’ into the world beyond just characters on the screen. The conveyor belt moves, the voice of the boss reacts to what happens, and the extra cameras with the alternate views on the smaller screen helps too.
I started messing with VFX graphs in Unity a bit during this production and even though my skill level was basic and ‘tutorial dependant’, I have since started looking into learning which elements I can learn to be able to better add ‘juicing’ to games I work on.
Production notes
Going into this game we felt ever so slightly more experienced after going through the production of the first minigame. We decided very early on to again keep it contained within one single room world as a limitation for us, and planned to do a modular approach once we were settled on the idea of the setting being a warehouse. While we did end up with a game with 3 levels of difficulty, we unfortunately did not end up changing the level layout itself between them. Instead the difficulty was adjusted by the orders one had to pack and the time the player would be given to pack them.
We went through the same motions of working through layout ideas as we had done on The Amazing Puppet Show, going from creating simple drawings on paper, discussing what the options were and then proceding to create the level within Unity.
For this game I did champion the conveyor belt running alongside the walls and in front of the loading zone, as I wanted to implement something that could both hinder and help the player depending on how they used it. The clutter in the levels, which increase in amount as you go from level one through three, was procedurally generated. This means there is a chance for it to naturally spawn in a spot that will make it be transported on the belt. However, as the belt continually moves, the player can use it strategically and place a needed item on it and have it be moved towards the loading zone while the player picks up another item, and overall cut down on time needed to move back and forth.