Piñata Race
• Genre: Party
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• Engine: Unreal Engine 4
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• Time: 2 Weeks
• Team Size: 6 (3 Designers)
Game Loop
Piñata loop
Car loop
Escape
Chase
Collect
Chase
Collect
Escape
Narrative Design
The story in short
Curtis, destined for a low class life, took faith in his own hands and created an untethered life. He takes what he wants, he does what he wants and he works for no one.
After being out on a supply run he returns to his camp to find it raided. It doesn't face him until he finds his family portrait destroyed in a puddle of water. He finds a coin with the stamp of The Stallion Bandits and in a fit of rage he starts his journey to kill every last one of them.
On his way to get clothes to blend in among the bandits he runs into an old friend, ex-mercenary Irene Holt. Their friendship has always been quite destructive but they work well together. She convinces him to let her in on his mission. When they arrive at the town of Oatman, all they find is the security AI roaming. Their new goal becomes to find the Admin bot to extract the information of where the bandits are headed.
A helping hand
The narrative in West of East was made to make the game experience richer.
It helped the 3D artists to get a feel for the world and it helped make sense of some design decisions. Along all that, it also helped set the tone and guide the player.
Adapting
Since we didn't yet know our limits within the team it was difficult to nail down a definite concept. However, the base concept of a revenge plot stuck through the entire project.
Banter
The goal of the dialog was to show the personality of the characters as well as the love-hate relationship between them.
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The dialog was also in the game, partly, to remind the player of certain key features.
The inspirations
Quinten Tarantino is famous for his exaggerated style. Strong language, gore, sensitive topics, sarcasm and a hint of humor are the pillars of his movies.
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What we took from that was mostly the gore and the absurd over-the-top style. Our narrative follows a person that is willing to risk it all to get revenge on thugs that destroyed his family portrait.
UX
Dialog system
When I first made it, it had a typewriting effect. This was mainly to grab the players attention. It did, however, have a lot of problems coming with it.
After experimenting a bit with the typewriting dialog, I decided to scrap it and went with a static dialog instead. This would later slide up from the bottom of the screen to ease in on the player as well as grab attention.
To finish the dialog boxes we experimented with different fonts that would be easy on the eyes and readable.
Our systems designer also added portraits to make it even more clear who was speaking.
Tutorials
For the first builds of the game, the tutorial was part of the dialog. When we decided to have a dedicated tutorial, the first idea was to have a "part of the environment" tutorials similar to Desperados 3.
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Feedback told us that this concept was easily missed and felt out of place, especially with the more text heavy once, like the camera movement.
After scraping the first concept, I decided to go for a more "over explanatory" approach.
I made a tutorial system that displayed a looping video in context with the text since a lot of players had a hard time understanding how some abilities worked.
The biggest issue with the tutorial is that it becomes very intrusive. It doesn't ease on to the screen, it pops up and pauses all gameplay.
With more time, I would have made it so the tutorial had some sort of indicator that the player could click. That way revisiting players could also skip the tutorial.
Project Management
I was the product owner for this project. Being the product owner and managing over a grupe of people in this maner was something new but intrueging to me.
As product owner I oversaw progress, managed the backlog, resolved differences and was the front face of the group.
One thing I wanted to acheve was an inclusive workenvironment. I wanted everyone to feel like they had a voice.
What would I have done differently?
