Project: Ether

Platform: PC (Downloadable)

Engine: Unreal Engine 5

Team Size: 32

Project Duration: 1 Year

Playtime: 30-45 minutes

Build: itch.io, Steam

Designer (Gameplay/Systems/Enemy)

Prototyped 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 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, and approachable game
Spearheaded 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

Ideation Challenges

Doing 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, we ended up not using most of them.

Paper Prototyping

Before getting into in-engine work, I worked with level designers to simulate gameplay on grid paper. This practice influenced a lot of our design choices, from simple enemy behavior to our shadow and light-based stealth mechanics.

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 the team better understand our audience.

Preproduction Challenges

Too many Artists

I incorrectly assumed that more artists = more work done. Coherent stylization, even with a highly detailed style guide, became a recurring issue.

Too many characters

Turns out, you need to scope characters first since writing is cheap but art and implementation are not. We ended up cutting our characters down, which ended up helping the narrative.

Not enough prototypes

As I was busying myself with leadership and production duties, implementation work fell behind. Having not enough prototypes would backfire later.

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.

Iteration: Ether

Ether went through different iterations before arriving at the final version. Here are some iteration examples.

Energy Queue

Inspiration: Transistor's turn-based resource management system

Idea: Ether stops time, and every action inside ether costs different points of energy.

Issue: Becomes too much of a tactical game. Do we want players to do complex algebra every time? Idea was abandoned before in-engine prototype was made.

Teleport

Inspiration: Assassin's Creed Mirage's Assassin Focus

Idea: "Wouldn't it be cool if you could stop time and teleport?" => Simplify 'points' into something direct and easy to understand

Issue: Power budget is difficult to balance- either too overpowered or useless. Easy to understand and direct meant dumb and simple- a double-edged sword.

Final Version

Inspiration: Good old time stop, but with a limit on movement range instead of "time".

Goal: Let player turn Ether on/off at a distance to allow them to observe and think, while also giving them a "get out of jail free card". Just a means to an end of taking down guards but not assisting directly

Conclusion

I consider Ether a wake-up call. I was humbled by this project and the lessons this taught me will live with me forever. I learned so much about not just directing a game but directing people, how to work with but also lead people towards the same destination. It also gave me so much insight about scoping and game feel that I would have never picked up otherwise.

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