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Shadow's Grove

Team Size

17

Role

Creative Director

Systems Designer

Duration

Sept 2023 - Nov 2023

Shadow's Grove was a collaborative 3rd year game project built in Unreal 5.2.

It is a 3rd person action adventure, narrative driven experience.

This project was in active development for over 3 months

As creative director, I established the design direction by maintaining documentation and facilitating problem solving around design.

As a systems designer, I brainstormed, prototyped, and balanced our game's core mechanics to serve the intended experience.

I also was working full time as an Associate Systems Designer at Raven Software/Activison, working on Call Of Duty!

If you want to hear the full story - read on!

Onboarding

Where an idea was shaped

An Early Start

In contrast to my previous projects, I was not involved in the initial concept of this game idea but was invited to serve as creative director after a couple consultations.

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The Initial Idea

The player plays as a 3rd person combat character who controls another agent (a wolf) to combat evil spirits and explore through an open-world to confront their necromancer father who abandoned them to raise the player character's step mom from the dead.

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Looking at this idea, it was clear the excitement and ambition was there, and some systems were prototyped as well. I provided feedback on the core game idea and I facilitated some small workshops to direct the game idea in a direction that maintained the integrity of the core experience while being exciting and achievable.
 

  • 3rd person combat character: I thought this was a great fit for the current idea, as there were plenty of comparable games that we could use for reference. The team already had comparables, so I decided to not adjust this.

  • Player controls another agent: From asking questions it was clear the intention was to demonstrate the connection (narratively) between the wolf and the human. The challenge of implementing an AI companion that felt good was a risk that the team agreed could be reduced. I adjusted the direction to have the character be able to transform between a wolf and human character to maintain the integrity of the relationship but avoid the AI requirement.

  • Combat evil spirits: Members of the team were very excited about including combat in this game, with some of the comparables being related to soulslikes. However with the intention of this experience being primarily about the narrative, I shifted the emphasis for combat (and gameplay) to prioritize approachability.

  • Explore through an open world: We loved the idea of exploring in an open-ended space, but to make sure the player understood the narrative and reducing scope creep, I adjusted the exploration to be linear.

  • Confronting antagonist who is also a relative with a deep backstory: Although our game was a narrative based game, I suggested we hire on a narrative designer to examine the current narrative, with the intention of simplifying the relationships but maintaining the setting and main characters.

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The Updated Idea

The player plays as a 3rd person combat character who can turn into a wolf to combat evil spirits and explore a linear world to defeat an evil spirit preventing the wolf character from leaving the spirit world.

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This idea still excited the team, and had a clearer and less risky breakdown of gameplay elements. This idea is what we took into pre-production and pitched to the rest of the school as we hired the remainder of the team.

I also prototyped early elements of our game such as an enemy spawning system, a interactable system (used for doors), and pickups to validate that core systems of this game could be built on.

The initial pitch deck for Shadow Grove

Preproduction

Where an idea took shape

Setting A Foundation

My priority when our team began development was to provide a clear path for our development team to understand the context of their work as it related to the gameplay experience.

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I documentated all of my work in various slide decks and sought feedback from the entire team in workshops where I took feedback and adjusted my design as necessary.​ 
 

My documentation covered:

  • A UX One sheeter

  • Combat Systems Documentation

  • Environment Systems Design

  • Boss System Design

  • Enemy Design

  • Shapeshifting Design

The UX One Sheeter for Shadow's Grove

The Combat Systems Deck for Shadow's Grove

The Environment Design Deck for Shadow's Grove

The Boss System Design Deck for Shadow's Grove

The Enemy Systems Design Deck for Shadow's Grove

The Shapeshifting Systems Design Deck for Shadow's Grove

By frontloading this documentation, I was able to establish early collaborative design iterations through early design discussions that included the entire team. This made the early design of the game transparent to the team and provided early targets for us to create an MVP around.

Establishing an MVP

To assist production, I also created a spreadsheet on what the requirements for the minimal-viable-product we wanted to product at the end of the 15-week pre-production period. This was meant to be replaced by user stories and tasks created by Production, but while they were setting up our task tracking system, this spreadsheet created a clear picture of what the team needed to work on early in development.

Screenshot 2023-12-17 112813.png

The MVP Task List document I created to break down the early requirements of our pre-production goals

Setting Shared Values

With documentation and a concrete tangible MVP planned, our team still felt there was a creative gap in the vision for the game. Our team had a couple struggles:

  • Our art team struggled to center on what assets to create, specifically on what was appropriate for the game and what was not.

  • Our design team wanted to have design decision criteria that was well understood by the team to prevent uneccessary back and forths.

  • Our audio team wanted to be involved in the design process, and proactively contribute to conversations.

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Although the UX document greated high level goals for the experience, it was clear there needed to be more specific creative goals for this project. The class required us to create design pillars, and I facilitated the creation of design pillars that our team agreed to proceed with.

 

Pillar 1: Story Driven Exploration - Players use various combat mechanics to interact with levels to discover narrative driven rewards. Rewards further their understanding of the lore and encourage exploration.

 

Pillar 2: Approachable Gameplay - Players feel empowered to interact with the combat and exploration mechanics regardless of previous experience with comparable games.

 

Pillar 3: Immersive and Emotional Impact - Players are encouraged to identify with the protagonist as they personally connect to the loss and nostalgia throughout the game, creating a flow state that ignore reality.

 

Pillar 4: Ethereal Game Feel - Player should feel transported into a fantasy world entrenched in decary. This world should evoke thoughts of the loneliness that follows the collapse of a vibrant existence.

Hands-On Systems Design

With our MVP Task List looking ambitious, and my documentation at a place where the team was happy with, I looked to assist in other areas. I assisted our tech team by taking responsibility for prototyping all of the exploration elements in our game, with the intention of getting our game mechanics playtested by real players as fast as possible. 

Our game was being built in Unreal 5.2, and having never worked in Unreal before, I proactively learned how to script in Blueprints while prototyping a number of core game mechanics, sharing progress updates daily to excite my team and get feedback!

Game Features that I prototyped:

  • Enemy Encounter System

  • Interactable Doors

  • A Dash Travel System

  • Breakable Objects

  • A Narrative Interactable

  • A Fake Wall

  • An Exploration Guidance Mechanic

  • Health Pickups

  • A Tutorial System

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Testing Features that I prototyped:

  • A Player Camera Adjustment System

  • A Local Debugging Analytics System

  • A Debug Player Teleporting System

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Further more, for ease of testing, I built a dedicated level in our build called the "Design Playground" where every mechanic in our game could be rapidly tested.

I empowered our team to evaluate the mechanic's complexity as well as allowed our team to playtest mechanics early in development by prototyping core systems early.

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Also by putting these mechanics in engine early, our team's morale and confidence in the design being implemented was high, and it was clear there was a lot of excitement around the momentum build around many of the mechanics I had designed!

A Prototype Is Made

In 15 weeks, we created the version of our MVP which included the majority of my original design. I felt really good about the state of the game, and it was clear the rest of the team did too. The work of every one of our team members could be seen in the game build and our peers and instructors were impressed!

Compilation of mechanics I designed in Sparrow's Grove prototype

Moving into production, I felt really good about the project. However, the stress of being in leadership and contributing in the way I did, compounded with my full time work, handling course work, being a parent, and preparing for a move was not sustainable. I decided for next semester it would be best for me to relinquish my role as Creative Director and focus on my work as a Systems Designer - allowing me to free more time for my own self care and that of my family.

Reflection

Where I look back

Lessons Learned

This was a really great learning experience, being a project that was a first in many ways:

  • This was my first project in Unreal

  • This was the first time I was a Creative Director, owning the vision for a game

  • This was the first time I was a Systems Designer on a team

  • This was the first time I worked on a project with more than 10 people

  • This was my first project I worked on while I was working full-time at Activision

  • This was the first project I did not see through to the end (I moved teams after pre-production)

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The important takeaways from working on Shadow's Grove were:

 

The challenge of bottom-up leadership: Managing the vision of a product and balancing that with the team's own vision and capabilities was a challenging experience in leadership. My approach was to shape the vision of the game by guiding the direction and evaluating where the project went over time, building the vision alongside the team. This conflicted with the desire of some other members wanting a fleshed out vision on all parts of the experience from me. This made me realize that as a leader owning the direction of a project, knowing when to lead and follow are both elements a leader needs to balance.

 

Avoiding burnout: A valuable lesson learned from this experience was a lesson in balancing work and life. I fronted a large amount of effort to position the project well and had multiple points where I felt the presence of burnout when events in my personal life (working full-time, moving, caring for a child, taking care of family) required my attention. I consciously began prioritizing my personal life and set boundaries later in this project that helped create some distance between the possibility of burnout, and made me more productive in the later parts of the semester.

 

Learning vs. Performing: One of the biggest benefits this project provided me was a realization of where my focus should be in my game design learning journey: Learning! This project had a lot of requirements, and in many ways demanded a level of performance that pushed me and my team. However I realized that performing to the requirements of this project did not necessarily mean I was learning how to be a better designer. During our retrospective it became clear the majority of the leadership team had lofty goals for this project which would require an acute focus on performance. This was the first time I had to decide to move away from a project

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Lots of great lessons learned here that I'll be applying to future projects!

 

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