The game is set in 1840s England with two main characters, Nimue, a young girl, and Ambrose, a cyborg bear. Working together they must push their way through Nimue's father's factory, solving puzzles with the use of platform generating artifacts, and destroy the factory.
Concept art of the game's main mechanic
As a designer I was engaged early in the project in developing the identity of the game. Throughout the project I helped shape every part of the game, and frequently worked with artists and programmers to convey the design of the game, and assist in implementation.
For the beginning half of the project I was mainly focused on providing support to all disciplines wherever problems were arising. I ended up helping with; setting up the characters, animation, set dressing, lighting, AI, level design, tool creation, and general pipeline improvements.
One of my large contributions is a mathematical blueprint that resizes platforms. When two artifacts are thrown in the game, a cube was created based on the positions of the artifacts. Taking the 8 points that make up the corners of the rectangular prism, I created an intelligent system that would relocate the points to nearby surfaces to allow the generated platforms to be flush with the surface. Along with going flush to a surface, it would find the top of a surface and align the top of the prism to be on the same level so that there would be no gaps or jumps required to go from the platform to the terrain it is connecting to. This blueprint allowed for the main mechanic of the game to intelligently react to the surrounding, as well as make AI navigation for the enemy cyborgs easier.
This pretty title screen looks way better then the blueprint I created for the node math.
Artifacts 1,2 and 3 being used with 3 of the 4 platform types (Red: Normal, Blue: Bouncy, Yellow: Gravity)
When the team's needs shifted, I took on the role as lead level designer, creating the puzzles that the players would encounter. With 4 artifact types (Normal, Bouncy, Invisibility, Gravity), and a range of 1 to 3 artifacts being available, I worked on making levels to showcase those mechanics.
Near the start of the project I set up the character controller that the team would use, and my decisions when making the character controller was a big learning lesson. Having not worked with the artists as much, I lacked the knowledge on animations and modeling which would have informed my setup.
As a result, my decisions made massive problems for the art team so I took on the role of implementing art into the character controller. After working with art on this, I wanted to get more into the art side to understand their work and processed to prevent making uniformed decisions again. I was lent to the art team and worked on animation changes, fixed state machines, and worked on the lighting. Before this, I had never worked on art, making this my first venture into animation and lighting. I learned how these systems worked and helped implement.
Character controller.
During the project I identified a pipeline problem, noticing the lighting artist was spending 20+ hours per sprint performing a repetitive task for building the lighting for each level. After talking through the process and seeing that the problem came down to a couple blueprints that were throwing off the ability to use baked lighting, I began quick work on a tool for the artist. The tool I made went through each level and performed all the repetitive actions that he had been doing, which included converting specific blueprints, changing collision states, and merging together specific actors. What was once a 20+ hour task per sprint to get build ready levels, became a 2 minute run and get coffee tool.