Overgrown is a 2.5D RPG that was created through the collaboration between SCAD's GAME and Animation departments and had over 100 total contribution from students over the span of 3 quarters
My role on the project was has both a level and game designer. Has the project
During my first quarter on the project, our goal was to make a playable MVP to represent Scad at GDC.
I was given the task of redesigning one of the first tutorial rooms for Overgrown. The room I designed was the main lobby where players were introduced to the games shop keep, Gold Bloom.
I was given the task of redesigning one of the first tutorial rooms for Overgrown. The room I designed was the main lobby where players were introduced to the games shop keep, Gold Bloom.
After we finalized the first 3 tutorial rooms it became my responsibility to both block out the room that I designed but also bring in all the system that was required to make all the rooms playable. Including doors/teleporters to connect the rooms together through level streaming, enemy encounter managers, and other miscellaneous systems.
Once we finished the tutorial sequence, we began designing the first wing of the Museum “Zoology”. We had other wings planned but due to time constraints and with how long hand drawn animation takes, we decided to settle on two with those being “Zoology” and “Marine Biology”. We came up with many different floor plans for Zoology, but we ended up deciding on taking some of the floor plans and rooms that we've designed and combining it into a short experience for the MVP For this quarter.
After we settled on the finalized room designs and floor plan, it became my job once again to both bring in the levels and connect all our systems to make the levels playable. After I finished bringing in the systems it became my job to both fine tweak and adjust anything that we felt was either too hard or didn't flow well, in preparation for GDC.
This prototype that we end up taking to GDC.
1st trailer
At the start of the next quarter we knew we had to expand the game to hit our target play time of 30-45 minutes. So, after on-boarding the new people we quickly begin designing and creating the Marine Biology wing of the museum.
It was also at this point where we decided to make our game nonlinear allowing the players to go to either the Zoology or Marine Biology exhibit first. We did this in the hope of speeding up development, however this really came back to bite us.
After Marine Biology was designed, blocked out, and implemented, we began play testing and found that the game was still too short to hit our target play time. So, we decided to create intermediate hallways to serve as transitional spaces between each main exhibit room.
With it being my responsibility to design block out and implement all the hallways on the marine biology side of the museum.
Fill Map
By the time this was done we had six weeks left in the quarter and we realized that no one was implementing or really designing quests for the game, so I decided to take up this role.
This was a much bigger challenge than I initially thought, our quest system at this point was designed for a linear game and since we decided to make this switch to nonlinear it meant that our system was no longer functioning. And redesigning the quest system was not really an option due to time constraints.
So, me and one of the systems lead sat down almost everyday tweaking and testing the quest system to get it to work in this new format.
This was a much bigger challenge than I initially thought, our quest system at this point was designed for a linear game and since we decided to make this switch to nonlinear it meant that our system was no longer functioning. And redesigning the quest system was not really an option due to time constraints.
So, me and one of the systems lead sat down almost everyday tweaking and testing the quest system to get it to work in this new format.
I also realized that our main story quests and almost all side quests weren’t really designed. While the characters that players interacted with were already created, how they interacted with the player and what they wanted the players to do wasn't. So, I ended up designing almost all of the quests in the game including the main story quest. With all the issues that we were having with our quest system, all the quests got implemented in the last week of the quarter. Right in time for our Steam Lunch.
Final trailer
