Uncapped

Uncapped was the final project of my undergraduate degree in Game Design. Our team spent a whole year going through the process of designing and pitching a game concept, all the way to releasing a build to a small audience.

Roles

As with many small projects, we each performed multiple roles on the project. We all shared Game and Level Design duties, and I played the part of Lead Programmer.

Puzzles and Challenges

Uncapped was designed with a main player ability. The player fired a multistate projectile that would alter its state each time it bounced.

Combined with generic FPS movement controls, we used this mechanic to create a number of logic puzzles and traversal challenges while maintaining thematic consistency and a unified experience throughout the game.

We were also able to extend the logic puzzles into combat, with enemies simply being walking puzzles themselves.

Player Onboarding

One of the aspects we focussed the most on was player onboarding. All of us have an appreciation for elegant design, and how you introduce a player to your game is one of the more challenging problems to solve.

We created a skill tree to manage when players were being introduced to new concepts and skills, and we referenced the tree constantly to ensure players were being smoothly onboarded.

Modularity

Due to the short timeframe of Uncapped's development, we needed to ensure that we maximized the amount of value we got from any given bit of work. To this end I built a modular tileset that the whole team could just click together when building out their level. The tileset was designed to ensure level metrics were maintained while avoiding z-fighting and other graphical issues.

Documentation

We made sure that we kept up-to-date diagrams of the various systems and levels in the game. These helped us in a number of ways, from personal reference to helping us change our perspective of the game through abstraction. Diagrams and maps also cam in useful for communicating with people outside the team.