• Platform: Windows

• Development Period: January — May 2022

• My Roles: Product Owner, Design Lead, Narrative Designer, Testing Liaison

Art:
Alexis Sophabmixay, Jessica Hunsberger, Kathryn Komerska, Spencer McKeown

Design:
Evan Hintz, Jared Vitchkoski

Production:
Brendan Smith

Programming:
Mitko Ivanov

Documentation

Since writing is one of my primary skills, creating design documentation often fell to me, whether it be the Game Design Document or the UI Wireframes I made in Adobe XD. Especially for the more formal documents I penned and updated throughout the development process, creating a strong, reliable formatting standard using a distinct hierarchy of headings was important for effective visual communication. Later finishing touches bolstered it further, like mini-descriptions to accompany titles on the Systems List. I defaulted to using Google Docs to create documentation due to its accessibility for the entire team, though some elements like the Core Gameplay Loop warranted the use of other software, such as Lucidchart.

Leadership

As the design lead during Bladebait Bog's development, I served as liaison between the other two designers and the rest of the team. Typically this manifested as short meetings held between all of the leads during full team meetings, wherein we updated one another on progress made regarding each discipline. As one of the two product owners, I also reviewed progress from my own and other disciplines to ensure they were in service of the overall vision the team had held themselves to work toward.

Narrative Design

After considerable Narrative Prototyping, the team fell in love with the notion of fish talking to the player after being reeled in, and it was later decided that they would speak in eerie, borderline biblical verse alluding to the underlying story. Since myself and the other designer collaborated on all of the game's written content, I made sure we were on the same page in terms of the tone, style of language, general length, and overall narrative progression of the Fish Dialogue to maintain maximum immersion. My approach differed slightly for the Journal Entries, which we decided could help shed interesting new light on the story through the perspective of a scientist with infectious curiosity concerning the anomalous body of water and its inhabitants. To both break up work and convey the character's gradual shift in sanity, I handled the first half of the entries, while the other designer handled the latter. I made sure to pay careful attention paid to the point of transition between our work. Finally I tracked important story details and content guidelines in the Narrative Bible.

Systems Design

Since Bladebait Bog is ultimately a narrative game first and a fishing game second, we wanted gameplay to be immersive, but reasonably straightforward and lacking a real skill curve. To that end, I helped develop a suite of intuitive mouse-and-keyboard controls. In particular, I pushed for the component of physicality derived from using the mouse to reel in a caught fish. Reeling presented some subsequent challenges, however, namely the fact that the fishing line became tediously slow as the bog's depth increased. To remedy this, we implemented a speed-up mechanic which increased the game's timescale by holding down the spacebar. See more of the design thinking behind the reeling system and much more in the Game Design Document!

Testing

As the primary testing liaison, I created a testing form almost every week during development, each corresponding to whatever new progress was made by the team during the sprint. This sometimes entailed correspondence with the producer, but I was consistently up-to-date enough with the latest contributions in order to act with predominant independence. When creating a form, I attempted to default to quantitative scale-based questions; to avoid tester burnout, text questions were better left for specific subjects that warranted specification beyond numbers, such as why a particular new art asset was rated positively or negatively.

UI Design

This project was my first foray into designing UI for a real game. After collaborating with the other designers to determine the functionality of each UI element we would need, I met with the artists to get a sense of what each UI element should look like. Then I created UI Wireframes for all of the game's UI elements using Adobe XD. The depth meter was the most challenging element to represent effectively, since we wanted to convey an element of mystery through the uncertainty of how deep the bog actually was; at one point, we had the notion of making it scale to only show the zones that are currently unlocked, but we ultimately decided to use the pink barrier indicators due to scope concerns.