Game Design Portfolio

Remember Wonder is a 3D collectathon platformer where you play as a puckish, palm-sized elephant plushie in a suburban home. Throughout the game the player collects motes of memory to relive memories of its former owner by moving toys and furniture around its owner’s room; arranging them into paths that can guide the player to each memory. Our team was inspired by Chibi-Robo!, Super Mario 64 and A Hat in Time. The player’s simple but versatile moveset will allow young and old players alike to see mundane life from a new adventurous perspective; older players can drop the mask of adulthood and try on some childlike wonder for a moment, and younger players can see that reality can be just as whimsical as fiction sometimes. We achieved this through our use of Unity and implementation of assets themed around a young child, to make our game look like a real place with some magic in it, rather than a fantasy with some real-world things in it. 

My role in this project was level design. I iterated and crafted the game’s tutorial and its single main level. Everything in the game required me to think critically about what features can appeal to people of all ages, which meant I had to consider children as part of that ordeal. A big part of the game’s theme is nostalgia and wonder, and I incorporated that in spades into the tutorial. We chose a cardboard box for the tutorial due to children commonly using it in pretend-play, and I pumped it with lots of sketches in many different colors to set the mood. As for the level itself, I mainly placed the memory motes around the room, but I had to make sure that there were multiple ways to get them, as well as verify that they are not too difficult for people who may have never held a video game controller before.

This was my first project that I had an entire year to work on, and I learned a lot during development. I learned how to prioritize the goals that we needed to complete. This was also my first time iterating on a level to this scale, so I learned how much goes into level design as a whole, along with some good practices to follow, like researching other games for inspiration as well as how to turn those possible ideas into a good way to benefit our game in a similar way. This project was also the first time I got to create a tutorial for a game. Finally, I learned how important having a good team process is; as it is needed for us to create a good product. In the end, we were able to create a refined game that meets the exact goals we set out.

The AI Story is a 2D narrative driven side-scroller. This game was developed by a group of 4 people using Unity. While this project was technically created for a college class, the class is formatted to emphasize the project as entirely student work, from initial concept to a completed game. In The AI Story, the player will be controlling a programmer who has developed their own artificial intelligence (AI) at their job. The game will simulate the passing of time by giving the player the opportunity to talk with their AI on a schedule similar to a work week. Each typical day will involve the programmer talking with their AI, before playing a mini-game under the AI’s witness. Within each passing day, the AI will behave differently, giving the programmer more encouragement until it goes totally crazy. Once the player notices the negative trajectory of the AI, they will gather information about the AI through a design document or a Twitter account, which will help them decide whether to save the AI or destroy it.

My contributions to this project involve working on the design of the game’s mechanics and narrative, with a large emphasis towards the latter. I designed the functionality of the daily chat, as well as a Twitter account for the AI. I wrote the dialogue in the game and incorporated it into the Unity scene using the Ink tool. The narrative for the AI was designed for it to start with a cold personality, before gradually becoming warmer then causing an overload. A real Twitter account was created and contains information about how to progress in the game, being designed specifically to make the player look through real information, essentially breaking the fourth wall. The fake design document includes similar information to the Twitter account, giving the player a password needed to advance in the game, thus further enhancing the idea that the game breaks the fourth wall by design.

While this project was not my first time working as a narrative designer, this project was my first time using the Ink software to incorporate dialogue into a Unity scene, allowing me to iterate the dialogue I wrote in the game itself. This was also the first time I took on a solo narrative designer role, which meant I had to get creative with what I wanted to narrative to be like. I needed to perform research on the type of personality the lead game designer wanted me to incorporate, as well as teach myself how to use the Ink tool and include the dialogue into the Unity scenes, in order to meet the approval of our team’s main game designer.