Project Guardian is a single player, third-person action brawler with a mechanic of possessing enemies and using their abilities in order to protect a foolhardy adventurer in his many quests for epic treasure.
This project was made for my final year capstone game development project during my undergraduate studies at Deakin University.
My contributions towards this project were towards the roles of the Lead Designer and Producer.
Links
Contributions Summary
As a designer I was tasked to:
Balancing ideas from the team and weaving it into a tight and fun gameplay which brings out the feel of a
Maintaining an organized and descriptive Game Design Document entailing all the details about the designs and the development processes. Ensuring that it is referred to by the entire team.
Creating mood boards to capture and convey the right artistic feel for the game.
Designing the level and ensuring that it is structured towards the fast-paced, strategic, hack and slash mechanics and also assuring it meets the artistic feel described by the mood boards.
As a producer, I contributed by:
Creating and iterating development pipelines suited towards a small student team and the unreal engine 4.
Acting as the main communication bridge between the art, audio and programming teams and ensuring they are on track with the sprint goals and deadlines.
Due to the lack of a dedicated game art team or game development students, I guided team members to get acquainted with the standards for developing assets for games.
Proceeding over meetings and keeping minutes of the discussions.
Other smaller roles:
Producing and outsourcing audio and music for the game.
Producing and showcasing promotional videos and presentations showing of the game and its features during multiple presentations.
Designer's Blog
Main Design
For the main design of the game, we challenged ourselves to tackle the notorious escort mission design which is known to be very bland and boring. My goal was to take this design and find out what aspects of it made it disengaging. After looking at multiple games following this design I noted that the reason for it being it being tedious was owed to the fact that the A.I. of the escorted N.P.C had many random elements in its design which made it difficult for the player to predict and hence many times the player lost due to no fault of theirs. Hence I structured the design in such a way that the adventurer follows a set path and has no random decisions so if the player lost it would be owed only to them.
Design Document
My second as a designer was to record and iterate over a Game Design document and ensure the team referred to it when making decisions regarding the design. There were a few iterations I had to make regarding how the document was structured.
Initially, it was difficult having everyone on the same page when it came to envisioning how the game would look and feel like. Everyone had their own interpretations and I was worried that this would lead to confusions in the future, especially for the art team given as they not familiar with games development. Using software such as PureRef to create and share mood-boards helped in alleviating this issue to an extent.
Level Design
The level was first blocked out using Unreal's geometry brushes and I exported the level to Maya and modeled the rooms accordingly to the structure. This was done so that the programmers could simultaneously test the design on the level block out while the level was being modeled. I had to texture and add materials to the models outsourced by the art team. I got familiar in using the Unreal's landscaping tool and foliage editor to populate the level and make it look more visually appealing. I also scripted special materials such as lighting and water shaders.
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