Group Project - 7 Developers
Duration: 3 Months
My Skills showcased:
- Co-Creative Director
- Lead Writer/Narrative Designer
- Mechanic Design
For my first years group assignment, we were tasked to create a 2.5 mobile game in a team. We ended up making Heir Hockey, which is a story driven, Sci-Fi sports game, which has 3 different modes of gameplay which change during the matches based on the in-game timer.
The player must score as many points as possible to beat the opponent. Whether that's by scoring a puck with the air hockey mode, hitting a ping pong ball over the net or shooting a football into a net.
The video above is a demonstration of a mechanic I thought of, where if the player collides with the ball while stationary, the ball will go upwards vertically which awards the player an opportunity to hit it again. If they do so, the "Strike" mechanic activates, where the ball gets hit harder than a regular kick.
Power-up Texturing and Modelling by Jay Paris
Within the moment to moment gameplay, power-ups spawn on the level periodically. I designed 3 different types: Speed, Freeze and Heart. After the programmer, Jay Paris got the prefabs to work, I extensively tested the powerups and tweaked the values until they worked well within the game flow.
The majority of my time on this project was writing all of the dialogue for the conversations between match rounds. Above is an example of a portion of dialogue I wrote in script format.
As advised by the programmer, we used a dialogue scripting system. At the start of each paragraph, I had to preface the character, round and animation state. For example: "(P, 1, IDLE)".
This system is similar to how YAML headers operate, except per-passage instead of per page. So, it worked well for the type of dialogue system we were shooting for.
Here is what some of my dialogue ended up looking like for the first level of the game.
This is the second level dialogue, which featured player choices too. This meant I had to write 3 variants of answers, with corresponding opponent answers.
Due to it being branching dialogue, it took a long time to write the whole conversations and a lot of iterating. But I think it ended up resulting in some interesting player decisions.
I also designed the "Best Response" and "Poor Response" dialogue system, where if the player selects the best dialogue options, they are rewarded with an in-game perk, the heart shield. This perk gives the player a temporary extra life which can only be broken once the opponent scores a point.
This is a gameplay demo of the "heart shield" mechanic working during a match
