About the game and its development conditions
Civilized Crook is a level-based first-person stealth game with problem solving elements. The game was developed by a team of 4 designers.
My role and contributions
Narrative Design
Besides the premise of having the gentleman thief stealing from unlawful corporations, my main task as narrative designer was to align the level structure and have level connections make sense within the world.
Level Design
Early in the project I started whiteboxing levels according to the project vision.
Original concepts included row house spaces and suburb neighbourhoods for the player to plan and execute their heists. The game was then down-scoped to a single skyscraper building with each designer contributing one level each (starting at bottom lobby, ending at penthouse).
My responsibility was the first level set in the lobby of the building.
The whiteboxing was based on a paper design layout. After intial blocking out of the space, placeholders were replaced with proper gameplay objects where applicable before consequent iterations on the level.
Gameplay Design
Before implementation I was active in designing player challenges in the form of CCTV cameras, patrolling gaurds and laser alarm systems.
Within Unreal Engine 4 I used Blueprinting to achieve minor gameplay moments such as doors, visual detection sensors, etc. For gameplay implemented by other team members I was also responsible for adding support for my SFX work.
I was also in charge of having gameplay difficulty make sense over the course of the 4 levels of the game. This threw some challenging tasks at me when levels were re-arranged in the middle of the project which were ultimately solved through additional playtesting and some minor balance changes to the earlier levels.
Audio Design
With very limited time for audio, I was tasked with finding free assets to use for SFX, and compose one track for the game.
License-free SFX assets were found in online libraries and modified using Audacity in some cases.
Implementation was done entirely in UE4’s systems where my proudest achievement at the time was the randomized footstep sounds using blueprinting in a very inefficient manner (after the team voted against FMOD usage).
The music track for the game was composed using Ableton and an M-Audio Keystation. The track is a simple creation using less than a handful of instruments with very little experience and guidance. Since this was not a prioritized task I did not have a lot of time to approach teachers for advice and guidance on the music.
The track I composed for Civilized Crook:
Tools and skills used
Tool: Unreal Engine 4
Tool: Perforce
Tool: Ableton
Tool: Audacity
Tool: Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, PowerPoint)
Skill: Script Writing
Skill: Writing
Skill: Composing
Skill: Whiteboxing
Skill: Scrum