DREAMS

• Adventure and explore through unique dreams
• Use different magic abilities to defeat enemies and interact with the world
• Decide how to save your companion and build and create different relationships.

Abertay University was selected to create and develop two games for the Young Game Designers competition BAFTA hosted. I was part of a 17 man team that took the ideas of these young achievers and made them into reality in 4 weeks. I did the level design on one of the game (Dreams) and collaborate with a multi-disciplinary team to implement an enjoyable game play experience. I was selected to showcase the game along side the YGD winner Camylle Tuliao to The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

• Level design – several iterations of level layout and key story points.
• Ability design – 3 types of magic abilities and how they react with enemies and objects within the environment including damage dealt and resource cost.
• Enemies design – enemies that split into two when damaged and others that provide a melee buff when defeated.
• Environmental energy shields that must be destroyed by certain types of abilities to continue on in the level.
• Audio design and recording for all game sounds.

The development process of dreams for extremely challenging but really great fun. We had no contact with the client and only had 4 weeks to create a game from a few pictures and 1 A4 sheet of paper detailing some of Camylle’s ideas who was the 14 year old young game designer BAFTA winner. So because everything was so vague it was great for someone like me (a designer) to draw between the lines, which gave me an opportunity to create and add to the game. There were 3 types of magic in the game so we had to figure out what they did, balance them and manage their resources. Another challenge was figuring out what would happen in a general level and the different game play mechanics. As there weren’t many notes on this but we knew the goal was to save the dreamer. We decided that having moving platforms (as its in a dream like world) along with waves of enemies and magic obstacles would work well for a vertical slice for the game. These ideas also fitted nicely into the narrative created by Camylle.

Shown above is the first prototype level built by myself when we were in the design phase. However I learnt it was far too big for what we wanted to show. In future for level concepts I make very small levels packed with all the features and mechanics in them so players can experience everything within 3 minutes for a vertical slice. It also helped that it was smaller for play testing and the given time frame for overall development.