Gabriele Serpella
Game Designer - QA Tester
LOTTI
Platform:
PC - Itch.io
Tools used:
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Unreal Engine 4
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Niagara
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Git-hub
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Jira
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HacknPlan
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Cascade
Role:
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Game Designer
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Quest Designer
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QA tester
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VFX Artist
Duration:
1.5 year
Team size:
5 people
An academic project in which I really put my knowledge as a designer to the test. Rewards, game progression, and environmental and puzzle design were the main challenges.
Managing the puzzles while taking the player's progression into account was the hardest part.
Game Genre
Single Player, 3rd person Story-Driven Platform Game with Magic-based environmental interactions. Players will have to navigate environmental puzzles spread in the final of four different areas and use the power of the four elemental essences to explore a fantasy themed world in order to progress through the story.
Duties
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Market analysis research, including the search for the player type
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Designed all magical powers, their effects and balancing
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Designed all rewards system, with unlockable items, collectibles and character skins
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Designed the position of all platform, puzzles, collectibles, items and npcs
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Quest designer
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Playtesting
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Created the backgrounds environment
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Created some VFX in game, with Cascade and Niagara tool, which is present in Unreal Engine. Environmental particles, air tornado, mana balls and shimmering aura when the player take a piece of lore
Rewards Analysis
In this document I had to analyze what kind of rewards to include within the game and how to get them to the player.
By analyzing the instrinsic and extrinsic motivation of our player types, I was able to find out figure out what rewards went best for them.
All different type of rewards in the game
Study of the intrinsc motivation of various rewards in game
All different type of rewards in the game
Gameplay Loops
Study of gameplay loops, with focus at negative and positive, core loops and operant conditioning.
Each time a puzzle is solved, rewards are obtained: crystals, aesthetics or narratives.
Each time a puzzle is found, you have a different difficulty, which can lead to the puzzle being restarted several times.
Each time a puzzle is solved, rewards are obtained: crystals, aesthetics or narratives.
MDA
An extrat showing the study of all the mechanics, with their accompanying dynamics and aesthetics. It allows to designers to understand if the game is following the player type and not making design decisions far from the initial decision.
