Niko's Pawesome Adventure is a educational/adventure game that teaches players on how to tame their negative thoughts. 

Roles

• Narrative Designer

• Level Designer

• 3D Artist 

Team

• Kien Ho

• Zachary Taylor

• Lucas Zakaria

• Michael Poulos

• Adrian Vilela

Year: 2024-2025

Timeline: 8 months

The team and I originally planned to include no narrative in the game. However, after some feedback from various playtesting, players were really confused about why they were on different planets and what they represented. Since the game takes place inside the protagonist, Niko's mind, we had to figure out a way to tell what the different planets mean.  The team and I had a meeting on how we can implement a narrative without having cutscenes or anything and we decided to use different props that are special to Niko such as his bike or his bed. Once the player examines the prop in-game, it will give a small description of what it meant to him and give a little backstory of Niko and what he is going through. With the descriptions, I was inspired by Life is Strange and how the main character examines different objects. I tried to go for that with Niko.

In the earlier builds, I had an opportunity to write some dialogue for the tree of wisdom and the puppy thoughts. For the tree of wisdom, I wanted to do something fun and goofy since we are building a game for children ages 8 and up. When I was writing the dialogue, I had pictured the way the tree would talk to the player would be something from Alice in Wonderland when the Madhatter would talk to Alice. With the puppy thoughts, we originally had one line per thought, per cognitive distortion. I wrote a few more lines when washing the puppy and made it that it slowly gets better with its thinking as it's being washed.

Originally, the plan was to have both regions on one single planet but afterwards, we scrapped the idea of that and decided to use different planets the player can travel to. I used Miro to quickly design the level that I was able to showcase to the team. I made sure to design for pathing for the player and different entry points to go to the other region. I got the green light from the team and I was able to proceed with creating the level in engine.

After creating the ice region, I assisted with creating the fire region. The level designer had envisioned that the world would be broken up into different islands since a volcano had erupted. He gave me a small section and let me design it however I wanted. We originally had a mechanic we were planning on using and that was the bounce pads which can be shown in the diagram. I used that for players to traverse to each island but it was tricky to add those pads without either being too close to the lava or without it levitating. I had a small meeting with the team and stated that one it wouldn't work and secondly, that it didn't fit the level narratively. In the end, we backlogged the bounce pads and swapped them out with grappling to trees.

Creating this section of the level was by far the hardest thing I have done. While the tool that was developed the programmer was helping but sometimes the object were sticking out or floating from the ground. I had to shrink some of the islands or add another object in front of it to cover it up. In the end, it turned out the way I wanted it to be. Over the course of playtesting, I had to adjust the scale of the islands and fix some of the grapple points. 

These are some of the assets that I had the pleasure of making for the project. Again, I'm new when it comes to making art as I have no type of background in it but I was learning throughout the year. My classmates would always give me pointers and advice which was a really big help. I made assets that I felt can be placed in the different levels to decorate them according to the theme of it. While we had to revamp the direction of the game, we had to backlog some of the assets that I had made but we can use them in the future!