Plushie Blaze
Plushie Blaze is an adventure open-world game where players use a physical plushie to fly Herb the dragon. In a world fully stocked with food items, your goal is to stuff yourself with as many meals as possible before time runs out.
Project Type
Alternative Controller Game - 14 Person team
Date
January 2024 - May 2024
Roles
Level Design
Link
My Role
The work I did on this project varied heavily. I joined the team after the inital prototyping phase, so I needed to figure out how to incorporate myself into this new team and new game. I started by trying to understand what the goals of the vision holder were and what game we were trying to make using a controller we would make from scratch.
I worked a lot with the team's system Designer to clearly define our core gameloop, design pillars, and mechanics. After that, I focused a lot on Level Design by setting up the team's developer gymnasium to establish consistent metrics and test mechanics. I worked throughout the rest of the game on the main world blockout and asset placement. We had amazing artists and environmental artists help with set decoration, models, and textures. So, later in the project, I stepped in to help with other required aspects of the project, like 3D printing and video editing for our game trailer.
My Process
I was initially on a seperate team for the pitching and prototyping phase for the first 4 weeks of the semester working in Unreal Engine 5. The first project did not make it past the prototyping phase and so I was assigned to the new Plushie Blaze team. This was only the second time that I had worked in the Unity Engine, so my early steps into the project were slow and I had to take extra effort to get up to speed with a new development pipeline.
Plushie Blaze was created by a student team of 14 developers for our Alt.Ctrl or Alternative Controller class over the course of 3 months. During this time, I met with all members of the team to coordinate many aspects of the project.
Ideation
The ideation phase was really fun on this project due to having great concept artists and a skilled narrative designer. Although there were some initial language barriers, we quickly indentified the best way for communication and checking in with each other to avoid misunderstandings. The game's mechanics revolved around two main things: A plushie world and being able to burn everything with dragon fire. This provided a solid foundation for fun ideas about the world's lore and the intentions of the main character, Herb. I tracked our ideas on our team's Miro board.
Our progress on the game was slightly stunted since we really didn't get a pre-production phase. Everything that had happened before I joined the team for the prototype was mostly discarded. So, as the artists were actively modeling and texturing things, us as the designers, fell behind and caused a bottleneck in the pipeline. After guidance from our great producers, we discussed our designs with the engineers and tech artists to quickly resume progress towards our games' functions while staying within scope.
Game Assets
I worked closely with our engineers and tech artists to design and implement the prefabs in the world level. Our games' mechanics revolved around three main objectives.
Design
The first thing that was new to me on this project was designing a level that the character would be airborne overhead the whole time. The challenge was that players controlling the dragon would constantly be needing to interact with objects on ground. Our producer/environmental artist came up a with brilliant idea to use splines of point collectibles in the air to guide players flight paths.
The second thing was systems design.In past projects, I had worked adjacent to systems designers and even taken upon the role myself to balance mechanics. However, this time I felt more confident thanks to what I learned in my systems design class. I am proud of the time I spent creating the values for our point scoring system and balancing those across all burnable objects including the main three objectives.
I also helped to record gameplay and create our game's trailer in Adobe Premiere.
Product
Something special about this project was our creation of our own alternative controller. We had a talented seamstress that made our plushie from scratch. We also had a talented engineer who was able to wire together and program functions onto our arduino board controller.
Our team was proudly confident that many people would want their own adorable plushie dragons. Our producers worked with a manufacterer overseas to produce them and we sold around 200 units of our game's dragon plushie.
Post Mortem
My passion on this project caused some internal team conflicts. As a designer, I was always asking the question 'why'. I have a good attention to detail and noticed when created assets didn't align with our gameplay mechanics or visa versa. It was challenging to learn how to get better at giving constructive criticism since my intention was never to attack the developer or their work. I viewed the game product as a seperate entity, so my inquisitive filter for what was added to the project and why was always active.
I learned that different people learn differently. I am a visual learner, so I'm great at creating and understanding layouts and diagrams. It was challenging for me to make my design documentation as accessible as possible, since some people prefer reading written instructions or oral discussions.
Credits:
Unity
Arduino
GitHub
Sourcetree
Maya
Miro