Embedded Files
29 Developer Team
8 Months Development Time
Unreal Engine 5
Out of over 200 pitches, Natural Disaster was voted through three rounds of elimination by students and industry professionals to become one of the 8 final games our graduating senior class would develop for Capstone. I was the Vision Holder for this game, pitching it individually in the first two rounds and along with two of my prototype teammates for the third round.
Led the design team and drove the development of the game's mechanics and content. Created design documents in Miro and collaborated the align the execution of designs with engineers, artists, and our sound designer. Built levels in Unreal Engine 5 and used Sequencer and custom tools to implement content.
Our mid-development presentation at EAE Play.
Producers Easton Madsen and Ryan Abney answer questions from John O'Neill, a Senior Software Engineer at Unity.
End of development presentation at EAE Launch.
Bryanne Smith (Art Lead), Gabi Anderson (Engineer Lead), and me (Design Lead) discuss the game with Roger Altizer, our capstone mentor.
EARLY DEVELOPMENT
One-page pitch document I made for the review panel.
The "First Look" video we shared to the public, reaching almost 1000 views.
Gameplay video provided to the review panel.
To create the player's interaction mechanics, I prototyped a mind map of player engagement. We valued an effortless control scheme using minimal buttons, so from here I narrowed down the mechanics the player would control and decided how variations of pressing the same button would warrant different actions.
The result is the controller diagram below I made for the engineers.
"Idling" results in the butterfly landing, a type of interaction. This contributes to the intended experience of trial and error, since the player could stumble upon new content just by pausing to think. Pressing or pressing and holding the main button was a different way to interact with an object.
This resulted in three categories of interaction: a Zone interaction where an object is affected when the butterfly moves into its space ("the flapping of a butterfly's wings" in the original Butterfly Effect saying), a Land interaction, and a Select interaction using a button press.
Document I made for our environment pitch meeting.
Character profiles written by another designer which I then organized into a diagram to balance connective content in each environment.
Designers used Miro to collaborate on designing the game's content, using sticky notes of comment chains to give and iterate on feedback. In this photo, the purple notes are my comments.
Storyboard I made of the content implemented for the Alpha phase to test our pathway sequencer functionality, using a screenshot of the level's whitebox to organize the scene.
Collection of images from real View Master reels organized by camera angle to compose our visual style and feel.
We used these as reference when designing levels and deciding the composition of perspective.
Whitebox of the park scene I built in Unreal.
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