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A top-down dungeon crawler inspired by Ori and Celeste where violence is not an option.
This project is a vertical slice developed by Shy Ghost Studio as the final project (TFM) for the 2024 UCM Game Design Masters. It is created by a multidisciplinary team consisting of artists, programmers, producers, marketing students, and designers from various Master's programs. In addition, the team is guided by professionals from the videogame industry, which creates a very professional environment that enhances and accelerates the students' learning.
My Work role
In this game I worked as Game Designer through all its development, being responsible for:
Game ideation and early prototyping of mechanics.
Level design.
Playtesting analysis.
Game Concept Document, Game treatment, GDD and overall documentation development and maintenance.
Gameplay, systems and enemies design.
VFX implementation.
Gameplay logic implementation in Blueprints.
My Work Highlights
Thanks to my technical background and the work of my two design team mates, we developed an early prototype in UE5 that allowed us to test our core ideas and establish a solid foundation for the project before the programming and art departments started to work on the project. This approach of early prototipation of ideas was repeatdly used later in the project, allowing us to develop solid gameplay and discard ideas on early stages.
I have academic background in data analysis and that influenced our approach to Playtests. I was responsible for analyzing them from a data perspective, making use of telemetry, to reduce self-biases since the first of the five playtests we conducted. This methodology allowed us to gain confidence in the design decisions made after each playtest and to track numerical indicators of improvement throughout the project. It essentially helped us stay focused on our vision and avoid getting disoriented during development.
One of the pillars of Nipa is the flow, which we enhanced in all aspects of the game. One of the works I am most proud of, and that most enhances the flow and game feel, is the player's character movement. The character movement in Nipa was developed using UE's character movement component, along with a sidecar component I developed to convey the characteristic floaty movement experienced in the game. This game feel was accomplished after many iterations until the desired result was obtained, teaching me a lot about gameplay development.
This vertical slice ends with a pursuit phase in the pure style of Ori and the Blind Forest, where two main characters appear: the darkness mass that pursues the player and the orange and white drake that blocks the player's path. I was responsible for early functional prototypes of both characters, which allowed us (the design team) to avoid waiting for programming to develop initial versions, enabling us to start working on the level design of this phase rapidly. Additionally, I created their technical design documentation for programmers to further develop them into polished versions.
As well as the prototyping of both characters, I was mainly responsible for the balancing of the whole phase and the level design of part two (of 3), where the player encounters the drake.
Tools used
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