As my first venture into solo-dev, Windward will be a cozy sailing game about navigation and seafaring developed in UE5. Check the weather, set sail and explore a magical archipelago as you discover the world and find where you fit in the vastness of the sea.

Beyond the genre

Most cozy games rely on two design patterns:

• Content-based progression (like the seemingly endless decorations you can buy in Animal Crossing).
• Labor intensive yet often shallow and repetitive gameplay (farming, cleaning, etc).

One of the main goals with Windward is attempting achieve the Cozy-Genre experience and gameplay aesthetics, but with a Clockwork Game Design at the core of its underlying mechanics and systems, hopefully achieving a deeper gameplay experience with a more elegant design.

This should result in:

• Progression comes from mastering the clockwork instead of unlocking all the content.
• Labor remains interesting as it is built as a decision-making contest instead of repetitive gameplay.

Current Status

A 3C's prototype has already been built as a proof of concept for the major risks and technical challenges, while providing a set of core mechanics that allow stablishing Rational Game Design metrics for scoping, level design and tuning.

The prototype currently supports:

• Custom Endless Gerstner Ocean
  • Capability of handing Wind directions that change wave and swell directions over time.
  • Shader and gameplay logic stay in sync while simulating the waves independently thanks to the deterministic characteristic of Gerstner Waves.
• Dynamic Weather
  • A modular system sets global weather targets and then each subsystem, like the Wind Subsystem, internally handles transitions and any relevant gameplay context.
  • Day/Night Cycle.
• Simplified Sailing
  • Core sailing mechanics that interact with the custom water and weather solutions.
  • Simple controls for challenging the player's understanding of sailing without a high physical skill bar to keep the cozy aesthetic.
• Curved World
  • To reduce world size and travel times without losing the vastness aesthetic of the sea and the need to interact with the navigation mechanisms, a curved world shader has been developed.
    • Keeps the horizon near the player.
    • Allows precise control over viewing distance, with the extra gameplay layer of making taller things visible for measurable, farther distances.
• [WIP] Celestial Navigation
  • Currently in development, celestial navigation will be at the core of the macro gameplay of the Clockwork.

From there I am iterating on the supporting systems/mechanisms for the Clockwork core, and in so, polishing a Core Loop with enough depth to support the game while keeping the scope within target.

About

"unBEATable" was a portfolio project developed by a group of my colleagues from u-tad's Game Design and Game Programing master's shortly after we graduated. At its core, "unBEATable" explored turning hack 'n slash combat into a rhythm game, turning every combat into a pseudo-turnbased pattern memorization and reaction game at the beat of an original soundtrack.

Contributions

• Beat System
  • Worked with the team's other designer and programmers to design the underlaying beat system that the whole game would be built on.
  • Every action would be buffered and executed on beat, using fmod events to ensure the game would stay in sync throughout.
  • Time windows would define the "quality" of the timing, and an affordance was given for a slight late hit, keeping everything parametric to allow fine tuning.
  • Every action and gameplay feature could reference the BPM, signature and measure of the currently playing song to scale accordingly.
    • Every action and gameplay feature was measured in beats (e.g. An enemy's anticipation may last 2 beats for a strong attack, this would scale with the song).
• Core Movement
  • Implemented the player's core movement using UE4's movement component.
  • Designed and implemented the Jump and Dash mechanics to work around the beat-based gameplay.
• Art & Tech Art
  • Built hologram shader for on-beat effects and world dressing.
  • Built a tri-planar projection "display" shader that allowed for on-beat visuals espacially y alligned across displays decorating the level.
  • Stablished a paragon-style material pipeline for cheap, quick iteration.

About

Finger Gun VR was the first VR Action game designed from the ground up for Hand Tracking technology on the Meta Quest platform. Gameplaywise, Finger Gun was a wave shooter with a rogue-like inspired upgrade system to keep runs interesting.

I was brought into the team on a tight schedule, as the deadline for an alpha version was approaching and the team needed to transition from a long period of prototyping to honing in on a product.

Joining the two founders, the new Art Director and I embarked on a two week pre-production to assess the current state of the project, design a shippable product and make a plan to deliver in, like every game production ever, virtually no time. Somehow, we pulled it off.

Contributions

• Preproduction
  • Joined the core team comprised of the two founders and Art Director.
  • Reworked the game's original vision and the team's prototypes into a cohesive product achievable within the tight schedule and limited resources.
  • Helped shape the game's final design pillars that would serve as the basis for the rest of the production.
  • As the only Game Designer, I worked to introduce the team to game design concepts to empower each member's ability to add to the final product.
• Documentation
  • Was in charge of all of the game's design documentation, as well as pitch decks and any marketing or store-page writing needed.
• Combat
  • Worked with the then still in beta, cutting edge technology to design the first real-time, action combat built from the ground up for VR Hand Tracking.
  • Redesigned and iterated the gesture detection system to achieve stable and responsive tracking. In VR (and more so in hand tracking), mechanics that would be a simple button press easily became quite complex systems.
  • Stablished "biofeedback" (can't recall who coined the term) as a requisite for clarity in each input hand pose, the most obvious example being the pressing of the thumb against the middle finger's knuckle to make sure the players "felt" they had successfully performed the shooting action.
  • As the tracking wasn't stable enough, I quickly made the decision to abandon "aiming" as a difficulty vector for the game, giving the player aggressive aim assistance and choosing instead to model the combat around timing windows and enemy attack patterns, more closely resembling a Hack 'N Slash style combat than a shooter (this allowed to define rational design metrics for enemy design and difficulty progression).
  • Hook
    • Also serving as the main movement mechanic, the hook allows players to pick up power-ups and grab enemies during combat.
  • Modules
    • A power-up the play could take from the enemies to steal their weapon types for a limited time, breaking up the pacing of the combat and adding depth to target priority.
  • Card System
    • Rogue-like inspired per-run upgrade system that allows the player to choose a card after each round, making each run different and systematically expanding the replayability of the game.
• Enemies
  • Robot Gallery
    • Defined the philosophy behind and designed every enemy in the game.
    • To create varied gameplay with little resources, each enemy would have a simple, predictable behavior, the combination of enemies at a specific location/time would create the combat challenges.
  • Token Manager
    • To enable a constantly growing number of enemies while authoring difficulty, a token manager regulated who could attack and when. Each enemy attack would have a token cost and the manager would have more tokens to distribute as the game went on.
  • Difficulty, Waves & Rounds
    • Designed a robust round system that allowed authoring the experience of a highly procedural spawn of enemies with an endlessly increasing difficulty.
    • Among its features, it included control over enemy spawn rate distributions per round ranges, pre-defined enemy spawn groups, authored pool of difficulty curves per round ranges, etc.
• Score System & Leaderboards
  • Designed a combo system that fed into a score metric, allowing the players to have an overview of their performance after each run and integrating Meta's leaderboard features to let players compete over the world and amongst their friends (online or locally).
• Game Modes
  • Designed 3 game modes as a part of the game's largest post-launch upgrade.
• Levels
  • Designed and blocked out all levels in the game, including:
  • Hub
    • Also used for the tutorial, the hub served as a landing place when opening the game, and as a diegetic main menu where players could review their progress, practice, redo tutorials or start a new run.
  • Battle Arenas
    • 3 Battle arenas are included in the game, as the player remains almost static during combat, the main difference is the magnitude of the angle from which enemies can attack the player, starting at 90 degrees and ending at almost 360 degrees.
• UI
  • Diegetic Elements
    • To make the most of the platform, a significant amount of would-be HUD elements were implemented as diegetic UI.
      • E.g. the health and remaining bullets, as well as the equipped Module are all shown on the player's glove as steampunk modifications.
    • Some menus were built as in-level machines and interactables, like a workbench that includes every enemy, module and upgrade the player can find in the game in a toy-like version they can grab, inspect and learn from.
  • Non-Diegetic Elements
    • Designed all menus for the game, including standardizing the visual and behavior language of the buttons and other UI elements to stablish a consistent, simple and intuitive interaction throughout the game's menus.
• Tutorials
  • Designed all of the game's tutorials.
  • Probably the hardest challenge in the game's design. Gestures needed to be clear enough so the game was sure of the player's intention, but a player doesn't naturally think about their finger's pose.
  • Two main breakthroughs were key for achieving a successful learning experience for the players:
    • Limit the number of available poses to the system at any given time.
      • E.g. when idle, the only poses the system can detect are the Finger Gun pose and the Hook pose. Only once the Hook pose is detected does the Fist pose to pull the hook becomes available.
      • This makes the inputs for the system cleaner to distinguish and keeps the hand shapes clearly distinct when the player isn't conscious about it (never expect the player to know what their hands are doing!), as the designers can think of a very specific, small set of poses that would be competing at any given moment.
    • Separate the learning from the doing.
      • Players would follow instructions without thinking and procede to forget what they did (since again, they weren't conscious of what their hands were doing).
      • To fix this, players aren't allowed to perform any of the actions while the tutorial prompt is showing. They must read it, close it and then try to perform the action.
        • If they missed it, they can re-open the prompt and try again (the level was designed to allow space to safely do this).
• Playtesting
  • Led playtesting sessions, reviewed video footage, gathered survey and in-game data and translated it into actionable tasks and priorities.
  • Implemented findings into design iterations.
• Writing, Dialog & Subtitle System
  • Wrote all worldbuilding, character sheets, dialogs and plotline for the (short) game tutorial that contextualized the setting and goals.
  • Prepared documentation with dialogs and direction for Doc. Holliday's voice actor.
  • Designed simple dialog system with responses to player behavior and tutorial integrations.
  • Stablished visual and behavioral rules to ensure the subtitle system was VR-friendly.

About

Developed as the final project (TFM) for u-tad's Game Design Master's Degree, "Naamu: The Lost Essence" is a 3rd person Hack N' Slash game made in Unreal Engine 4, where your main resource is both your health and you energy, meaning you will lose life every time you attack and will need to manage this resource very carefully in order to survive.

Born from the idea of using blood magic to convert your own blood into your weapons, during Pre-Production, the entire design time worked together to figure out how to make that into a playable game that was viable for our production time, and more importantly, fun to play.

Once we entered production, we had a strict policy of prototyping every game mechanic in Blueprints before handing it over to our Programmers for final implementation.

Contributions

While the team worked together early during preproduction and everyone was involved in every aspect, once we went into developing the first prototype, each designer joined a team of programmers and artists to develop a specific area of the game. By the end, I led or participated in the design of:

• 3Cs Design
  • Core Movement
    • All movement abilities (run, jump, dash, wall bounce, etc.) and the definition of rational design metrics to empower level designers (max jump distance, distances for levels of challenge, etc).
    • Kinetic Energy.
      • A unique mechanic that allowed the player to "build up" energy as they chained up combos without taking damage, this energy would then amplify or buff most actions.
  • Combat Rework
    • Late in the development the game reached a critical point where the combat just wasn't landing. Combining part of the combat team with my team, we made a small taskforce that had two weeks to completely revamp it without room to make any more significant changes, the result is what can be found in the game.
    • This change introduced the now core concepts of purification as a finisher based on kinetic energy and last resort mechanic to survive going beyond 0 health while attacking, while simplifying other aspects and refocusing the combat to be proactive instead of reactive.
• Level Elements & Systems
  • Environmental Hazards
    • Elements like Corrupted Rivers and Vines that limited movement and locked the player into battle arenas.
  • Puzzle System
    • A low production cost system that structures gameplay and encourages exploration while delivering environmental storytelling.
  • Enemy Wave System & Spawn
    • Tied to the puzzle system, combat zones can also close off areas, support multiple waves of enemies with flexible authoring and enemy-specific features for spawn mechanics (e.g. Wolfs jump from over the hills while snakes come out of burrows).
  • Music & Ambience System
    • Zone and gameplay context-based system that handles music and ambience as the player traverses the world, enters and exits combats, etc.
    • Developed in close collaboration with and to achieve the vision of the composer, who ended up winning the PlayStation Talents award for Best Original Soundtrack that year.
• UI
  • HUD
    • Player Health & Kinetic Energy Bar
      • As the most complex UI element in the game, the Health Bar needed to accommodate the health recovery mechanic, track kinetic energy, inform of the finisher availability and highlight last resort state while doing all of its usual jobs and allowing the player to focus on the combat.
    • Enemy Health Bar
      • Dynamically adjusts divisions to inform the player of the enemy's total health.
    • Enemy Indicator
      • To accommodate for the high-speed action of the game yet fairly close up camera that provides a more intimate connection with Naamu, animated arrows appear around the character to indicate enemy spawn and attack directions.
      • Each enemy type has a different style arrow and each attack type animates differently to reflect the type of attack (e.g. Long range attacks animate the arrow into an exaggerated thin and long stretch)
  • Post Process Effects
    • Used to reinforce when the player takes damage and/or goes into last resort state.
  • Menus
    • Implemented the Main and Pause menus, as well as loading screens, animated loaded icons, etc. including dynamic controller and mouse & keyboard support.
  • Tutorials
    • Wrote and implemented all tutorial text, UI and gameplay affordances, including animated camera transitions to highlight relevant elements, button-press prompt pop-ups, etc.
• Level Streaming
  • Worked with the programming team to define the game's level streaming workflow and handled its implementation to ensure a smooth transition through the entire game world.
• Tech Art
  • I was able to use my background in Game Art to help the art department by taking over a lot of the implementation and problem solving around some technical features of the game, while they focused on asset production. This included:
    • Purification
      • Built a custom tri-planar projection shader that allowed to purify the environment, making between material sets in a circular motion expanding from any purified Corruption Core in the world. Along this, the handler checks for any gameplay actors that could be purified and individually purifies them at the right time.
      • Every enemy and some gameplay actors in the game have a Corrupted and a Natural state, I was able to use a disintegration shader produced by one of our artists played forwards and backwards respectively to implement a transition during gameplay.
    • Animation Blueprint & Workflow
      • Was responsible for the entire animation setup for the player character, including Leg IKs, Upper/Lower Body Blending, leaning while running, etc.