I S V A K
-Pitch:
ISVAK is a single-player adventure with survival elements. Another ice age has struck the planet. Most of humanity has fled or succumbed to the extreme climate, but those left behind live in an everyday struggle.
You play as a hunter of relics from the world before the ice age. These relics and other treasures lay deep in water below thick ice. You will dive to search and collect the treasure from beneath the ice, trade whatever items you can find to improve your gear, ensure your survival, and maybe even escape the frozen ocean wasteland.
-Project Details:
Platform: PC & Mobile
Engine: Unity
Language: C#
Development time: 6 weeks
Team Size: 3 Designers, 2 Programmers, 2 Project Managers.
-My Role on ISVAK:
World, Narrative, Level, & Mechanics Designer.
- World Design:
During our discussion of the core game loop, we also discussed its overall appearance. I drew a couple of sketches and created a few mood boards.
The categories that the mood boards covered were:
- Environment:
This included a variety of harsh frozen landscapes, different waters, and base colors for the world.
- Structures:
Different housing options could be built from anything salvageable in our fictional world.
- Clothing:
Exploring the concept of reusing materials from wildlife, possible underwater foliage, and whatever gets recovered from below. Yet contrasting to the blue color tones of the rest of the world.
- Transport:
Transportation was the smallest of the mood boards, covering wind and sled transports, implying the vastness of the world and the possibility of covering the frozen wastes by more than walking or running.
Putting together these mood boards allowed us to find the look and feel we were satisfied with. We could refer to mood boards when introducing new ideas to our fictional world.
- Narrative Design:
Half a week into our project, we needed to expand on the world and the player's end goal.
- Overall Description of the World:
I began by writing about the events that had led to the current state of the world, where the game took place geographically, and the main dangers of the present-day world state.
I followed up by describing how the civilization coped with these changes and what everyday life looked like for a human living in frozen waste. This made it easier to outline the settlements, the different roles within those settlements, and the tasks these settlers performed.
- Main Character and Desired Gameplay:
Then I moved on to the main character and their goals, experiences so far, and the reasons they had for being here.
This simplified what should be the focus of the gameplay narrative for the 10-minute vertical slice we were tasked with. Answering questions like how do we lead the player through this experience, what information the player needed to complete the given tasks, and how can we take the player from point A to point D of the vertical slice.
-Level Design:
I made a few quick sketches of the level based on the mood boards, narrative, and what we had discussed with the team. This would be the area in which the player would be shown all the main core mechanics of the game, a tutorial/introduction zone.
After the sketches, we made prototypes in Unity to get a rough feel for how the navigation of the level would feel. After that, it was up to the programmers to start working on different functions.
I made visual prototypes rather than functional ones for the programmers to ensure we were on the same page about specific mechanics.
After that, it was mainly to repeat the same process. Remove or rethink if something didn't work, and keep what did work.
There were three layers to the level that made it slightly challenging.
These layers were above the ice, below the ice, and at the bottom of the body of water. I focused on what happened to the player above the ice and at the bottom of the body of water. This included visual and mechanical design.
The core idea of the level/world remained the same until the end, but the look and approach of a few things had to be reworked visually and mechanically throughout the project.
-Mechanics Design:
We debated about different mechanics and the best way to integrate them. I fleshed them out by creating flowcharts to discover flaws before programming, making them more visual for our programmers to minimize misunderstandings in communication.