Project: Ether

Platform: PC (Downloadable)

Engine: Unreal Engine 5

Team Size: 32-41

Project Duration: 1 Year (10 weeks ideation, 10 weeks pre-production, 20 weeks production)

Playtime: 30-45 minutes

Build: itch.io, Steam

Designer (Gameplay/Systems/Enemy)

Prototyped and iterated on Hex (projectile) and Ether (time stop + information reveal) gameplay mechanics, aiming to make stealth more approachable
Designed enemy AI behavior with 3 distinct states and a light detection system to balance difficulty and approachability
Collaborated with narrative, audio, voice acting, and UI to design a narrative system that blends cohesively blends gameplay, narrative, and audio

Game Director

Acted as creative visionholder from pitch to shipping, overseeing all creative aspects of the game to create a cohesive, diverse, approachable game
Spearheaded all recruitment & collaborated with 3 producers to ensure a healthy development cycle across the team with no crunch
Led meetings, playtest sessions, team gatherings, and sensitivity interviews.

Postmortem

"Nonbinary Game Design"- Did I succeed?

I started with a lofty experience goal/design pillar: a term I coined "nonbinary game design". I wanted every aspect of the game to break molds; the word "nonbinary" was there on purpose, to purposefully set a duality and attempt to break it through various elements present within the game.

Looking back, I feel like this approach was too lofty, especially at such an early stage of the project. I feel like by setting this goal for myself and the team we weren't able to experiment enough- after all, this goal was not a result of any prototyping experiment but more of a philosophical approach I wanted to explore.

Ideation Challenges

Wrong- Characters First

I came up with the characters before anything else. Since I didn't know that 8 characters would be WAY out of scope I conducted 10 sensitivity interviews. Even though I learned a lot during those interviews (and some of those lessons are incorporated within the game) most ended up being not used by the team, only being used to fulfill my ego.

Right- Paper Prototyping

I had level designers design levels on grid paper and use erasers and pens to simulate player and enemy movement. This helped with rapidly iterating on enemy systems, but also made me realize that player and systems need to be set in place before enemies can be designed; with everything up in the air, it was a bit difficult to focus on a specific element to iterate on.

Right- Player Profiles

I was inspired by this GDC talk (by Emily Short) to do a quick interview with a friend and come up with a design persona. The notion of "designing for one person" helped personalize the rather corporate "User Persona" and helped the team understand the target audience better.

That said, I wish I had more playtesting and prototyping to better align target audience goals with gameplay experience goals.

Preproduction Challenges

Right and Wrong- Art First

As we began to recruit more artists stylization (especially since we were going for a style with not much direct inspiration) became a problem. Our style guide and art system was told by multiple student artists as "very helpful", but I feel like a lot of the concept work was for naught as game scope wasn't clearly defined, resulting in inefficient work delegation/some work being thrown out.

Wrong- Too much narrative

As a narrative-focused game I thought getting multiple writers on board early would be a good idea to flesh out characters. Turns out, you need to scope characters first since writing is cheap but art and implementation are not. By the end of summer, we decided to cut 3 characters due to art scope (luckily, narrative didn't start work on those yet).

Wrong- Not enough engine prototypes

As I was busying myself with leadership duties, design work fell back a bit naturally. I did write a lot of documentation and did some prototyping exercises, but with designers not yet proficient on Unreal and programmers being on summer break resulted in engine work being very behind- something that would have consequences, as I later realized.

Wrong- More is not merrier

I was paranoid about art scope, and thought more artists would get the job done faster. At one point the team reached 52 people- the onboarding and interview time to sustain that already took quite a toll on my time and mental health. Turns out that's not the case- some that I interviewed for fell off the team after a few weeks of ghosting the team. Things got a lot more stable when that number dropped to ~35.

Iteration 1: Guard AI

Iteration 2: Ether

Iteration 3: Hex

Conclusion

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