Game & World Design

This year I’ve been spending free time participating in GameJame events on itch.io in an effort to expose myself to and practise working in proper game development environments. I’ve grown and improved a lot as a designer and wanted to use this space to talk about some of the processes I use and skills I’ve acquired whilst developing these games. The projects I’ve worked on each afforded unique challenges and opportunities that demonstrate these skills well.

“The Traveller’s Eight” – A World Design Challenge

I really wanted us to emulate the exploration feeling I got when playing Terraria for the first time, with this big seamless world that had biomes bleeding into each other and dungeons to explore in each. What we created was The Traveller’s Eight, a 2D platforming exploration game set on a near-deserted and destitute pirate island.

The first half of my time in the jam was spent working with the lead designer on the world, its puzzles and minigames, and the unique platforming elements that would appear in each area. From Terraria to MMOs to Dark Souls, variety in a world can really stick with players and give a sense of scale beyond the boundaries of the map, and so I tried to carefully plan out a world that would feel like a single piece of a larger landscape. Atmosphere and variety were also huge priorities so I made sure our separate biomes felt distinct, working with the audio and art team to create what I think became the strongest part of the game overall.

If you’d like to experience the game in its current WIP state, you can find it hosted here.

“Stay” – Narrative Tropes & Emotional Response

Unlike my time with previous jams, I decided to try stepping up into a Lead Designer position for this game and try coordinating the full development experience. It was a large burden, but one that I took to well, guiding each member of our smaller team into specifics and coming together for a project I’m really proud of. What we came up with was ‘Stay’, a point-and-click adventure game about surviving and (eventually) escaping from a home you are trapped in as a house pet, immune to whatever strange doomsday seems to have killed off all human life. 

Outside of organising our workflow, I spent the rest of my time designing the ‘levels’ we would have for the game, focusing on how to reuse the same small space but create variety in exploring it. One element of the environment I experimented with was essentially the diegetic application of a ‘rule of threes’ approach to writing; as the player would be trying to meet the same basic goals as each week went by I designed a kind of punchline every time the player achieved something on the last level. For example, there was a trick where the player may end up accidentally eating their owner’s corpse when searching for something to play with if they were persistent in interacting with it.

The current build can be downloaded and played from here.