PROJECT OVERVIEW
Year: 2021
Role: Game Designer/Level Designer
Collaborators: Joey Schutz, Evie Wang
Medium: Walking Simulator
Engine: Unity
Love Story is a walking simulator about the end of times and finding the bravery to say important things in the last minutes. We wanted to explore themes that people would care about seconds before their death, highlighting how small our lives are. Who says that romance is dead when you can gift flowers to your crush and die looking at them?
This project was a student assignment to create a walking simulator experience in under 3 weeks. We discussed an apocalypse theme, its meaning to people, and ways to show their thoughts in a smaller scope with minimum animations. The most important question was the way the world is ending because that would shape the whole experience.
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
I worked as a game designer and level designer on the project. This project really taught me a lot about collaboration and simplifying ideas for the sake of time and creative vision. I think that while we were working on a smaller scope, our decisions to simplify specific elements gave a special charm to this project: the "frozen in time" characters became another symbolic element of it. My work on this project showcased my ability to adapt to new challenges while also being able to collaborate with creators of a very different skill set - delegating tasks and being clear about our next steps in documentation was extremely important for our experience.
LEVEL DESIGN
It was my first time collaborating on a project in Unity where we needed a combined work of two people happening in the same scene, so we worked mostly through prefabs. I created the street part of the level, packed it into a prefab, and then combined it with what my colleagues were working on in one scene, adding other prepared elements like people on the streets, the moon, and other decorative elements.
It was my first time collaborating on a project in Unity where we needed a combined work of two people happening in the same scene, so we worked mostly through prefabs. I created the street part of the level, packed it into a prefab, and then combined it with what my colleagues were working on in one scene, adding other prepared elements like people on the streets, the moon, and other decorative elements.
An important element was pacing - how to let the player explore the level, while also giving a sense of dread and the upcoming end of the world? Well, the answer to that became the looming moon, but also the level structure. Coming down the stairs, the player almost welcomes the moon, walking to their death, still hanging onto the thought of their crush not knowing.
We wanted the growing moon to look horrifying and a bit trippy. Interestingly enough, I used real-life moon images from the NASA website, which made it look realistic. The generated noise map added a trippy effect due to the distortion of the object when it's getting scaled up and I was happy with the result of the overwhelming and, almost, devouring moon approaching you.
