"Pugs and spy movie stereotypes in a stealth platform game"
Agent Carl is a 3D stealth platformer developed in 6 months as the final project at Digital Bros Game Academy.
Commissioned by BadSeed Studio.
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This project was entirely developed in remote working due to the 2020 quarantine.
MY ROLE
For this project I was appointed as Lead Game Designer.
My main tasks:
- Organize the design team workflow and assign tasks to its members.
- Update and maintain the Game Design Documentation, to make it coherent and understandable, especially by other departments.
- Optimize the workflow and create prefabs for faster and more effective in-engine implementation.
- Level design, player guidance and tutorials.
- Tutorial, narrative and dialogues.
THE CHALLENGE
Blending a platform game with stealth mechanics was an interesting challenge, mainly because of the completely different natures of the two genres. So the game progression and level designs have been structured to teach the player separately how to control the character in the platform areas and master stealth approach in dedicated scenes. In the last part of the game the two were blended together in a bigger scene which extends vertically and can therefore be played both stealthy or in a more action-platform way.
As a Lead Designer I did my best to ensure that my design team understood how to work with the engine and provided them with tools and prefabs to speed up the level building and tuning processes.If there is a problem or something that couldn't be done in one way I know that there can be another way to achieve the most accurate result of what we needed.
Another big challenge was trying to cover all the parts of the development due to the project scope/team size and expertise rateo so I frequently covered smaller gaps with some coding or texture asset creation as well, going back and forth from Visual Studio to Photoshop, after ensuring that everyone else had a focused task to work on.
FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
The IA required a lot of work in perfecting it's behaviour and took most of the programming team efforts and time, therefore leading to a lot of overtime work to ensure that also the other parts of the game were developed at their best. In fact the game could contain more feedback for player actions therefore leading to a better engagement during gameplay.
With a few more specialized figures in our team some parts could have been done better like for example the animations which are mainly downloaded and slightly modified because the team didn't have much expertise on that part.
The fact that lockdown occured at the very start of the development was a potential threat to the team morale, but we constantly supported each other and worked together to keep motivation high during every development phase. Resolution of whatever odds we encountered has been done with positive and collaborative exchange of opinions and ideas; this was crucial for the end result we obtained.
Genre: 3D Stealth/Platform
Engine: Unity
Platform: PC
Duration: 5 months
Team size: 14
