During the fourth year of my Game Design studies, I worked on a 6 months project. The game is Pumpkid The Insight Knight. It's a 2D game offering a narrative experience in Visual Novel with dynamic die-and-retry boss figths. We were 15 working on Pumpkid. I was Game and Narrative Designer.
Missions:
I had several missions. First, I participated to the narrative of the game (Story, dialogues, choices, clues).
I also developed the concept of the game with the other designers (we were 3 game designers).
I made a lot of documents like creative briefs, asset lists, sound lists and feedback lists, flowcharts, game overviews etc.
The game was developed with Unity, so I used this engine.
I also used Fungus in Unity to create the Visual Novel part with the dialogues, the different choices and the realization effects (screen shakes, fades to black etc).
I also developed the concept of the game with the other designers (we were 3 game designers).
I made a lot of documents like creative briefs, asset lists, sound lists and feedback lists, flowcharts, game overviews etc.
The game was developed with Unity, so I used this engine.
I also used Fungus in Unity to create the Visual Novel part with the dialogues, the different choices and the realization effects (screen shakes, fades to black etc).
Almost all the documents and screenshots are in french because all of our teammates were french, so it allowed us to save some time.
We created several types of bolts that the player can choose.
Before using Fungus on Unity for the narrative, I used Draw.io in order to create flowcharts that everybody could read and understand.
These are flowcharts that present several variations of a same dialogue with a NPC, depending on the player's choices.
Here is the flowchart on Fungus, in Unity. In each yellow brick, there are several dialogue blocks and realization effects like screen shakes.
For our narrative, at the beginning of the project we had several NPCs. Finally we only kept one.
Each character we have created had it's emotions, motivations, thoughts etc on a document. Here the one of the main character:
Each character we have created had it's emotions, motivations, thoughts etc on a document. Here the one of the main character:
These are the game loops. The first loop is about the game launching. The second one is about the Visual Novel and narrative part. The last presents the boss fight's loop.
I created several documents during these 6 months. Here you have some slides of a Creative Brief about the Neutral Boss Form:
Extract of a slide about the interaction between the player and the NPC in the visual novel part.
This is also from a creative brief.
This is also from a creative brief.
Some slides I made about the Game Overview:
We also worked on the Rational Game Design of the game in order to modify its Atomic Parameters, the difficulty, the inputs, some mechanics, the skills needed or the experience wanted.
I created different lists to help the game artists, the programmers and the sound designers.
Here are extracts of the asset and feedback lists.
Here are extracts of the asset and feedback lists.
Asset list extract.
Feedback list extract.
An extract of a technical document, made for the programmers: the FSO (Feature Sign Off). This one is about the interaction between the main character and the NCP.
Just some screenshots of the boss fights:
This document is called "Glossary". It has been created for giving names to the different features of the game. It helped us to communicate easily and to know who is talking about what because the game has several parts (boss fight, visual novel) and also different boss forms (neutral, winter, august). Making things confused was inevitable without this document.
The game is avalaible on Itchio. You can click on the logo to access it.
