Tea Time's Over
Unreal
Academic
22 People
Ongoing
Core Tasks:​
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Create a highly engaging action-combat gameplay loop
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Create a Roguelike progression system for interesting in-run buildcrafting
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Organize Sprints, Strike Teams, and a Roadmap of User Stores.​
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Align a large, interdisciplinary team's vision of a game
Page In Development
Last Updated: 11/11/24
Overview
Tea Time's Over is my current Junior year game development course project at DigiPen. It's a top down, ability based, fast paced roguelike based on the original Alice in Wonderland books, developed in Unreal Engine 5. I serve as the team's Design Lead and Co-Producer, leading an interdisciplinary team of 22. I work to define the game's direction, and schedule and plan sprints. I also serve as the team's Combat Designer, creating and implementing abilities and upgrades. This project is the culmination of my development as a designer, and has taught me an immense amount about leadership and large scale development. This page will focus on my combat work for the project. If you're interested in my production work, see this page.
Combat Identity
After some early team-wide brainstorming sessions, the team landed on a rage-fueled Alice as our protagonist. ​​​As the early project hiring process began to slow down, I was able to get to work on establishing the game's core combat philosophies. In an early brainstorming meeting, we landed on a few words to describe Alice and the way she fights. Of those, concussive, lithe, and banshee would be the ones that stuck the most. These formulated our first game pillar, "Concussive, lithe, force of nature", which would serve to guide Alice's combat design for the rest of the project. ​
Presentation I used on pitch day, made with 48 hours notice
Please Don't Touch Anything
The Stanley Parable
Adventure Capitalist
Ability Brainstorming
Now that we had a clearer vision of how we wanted Alice to fight, we started brainstorming abilities. The team landed on a hybrid fighter/spellcaster archetype, similar to half-casters in D&D. We sought to create an identity for each ability slot, since we wanted to have multiple abilities for the player to choose from down the line. This would allow us to preserve a designed play pattern, while still allowing players to mix and match. We brainstormed a large list of abilities, cut those that we didn't think fit Alice, and then sorted the remaining abilities into each slot based on the slot's identity. We then discussed which abilities we thought would suit our fast paced, aggressive, gameplay the best, and moved on to prototyping.
Please Don't Touch Anything
The Stanley Parable
Adventure Capitalist
Prototyping
Now that we knew which abilities we wanted to start with, I went to prototyping. During this process, our tech team had been researching Unreal's Gameplay Ability System (GAS), and caught me up to speed. One of the programmers had laid the groundwork for triggering abilities, so I could now go in and make the abilities themselves. I started by creating a function library of common functions we might need so that we could rapidly prototype abilities in the future. I then took these functions to quickly make our prototype abilities, and was able to get them off the ground by the end of our 2nd sprint. This was my first experience blueprinting in Unreal, and I'm very happy with how quickly I was able to pick it up and get things done.
Suits System
From the original concept of the game, the abilities system had another layer designed on top of it. During a run, the player can level up and earn Suits. Suits are upgrades that can be slotted in to abilities to give them a given bonus for the rest of the run. The goal for this system is to provide run to run variation, and create an interesting sandbox for the player to buildcraft in. I laid the backend groundwork for this system on the combat side, while I worked with our team's UI designer and programmer to develop the menus for the system. I implemented four rudimentary suits as a placeholder to prepare for an upcoming playtest, where we hoped to validate our concept for the game across the board.
Lessons so far...
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Clear game pillars continue to be an invaluable grounding force, especially with crossdisciplinarity development.
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Great design ideas come from everywhere. Loop the entire team in on brainstorming meetings and important decisions when it's feasible, and you'll end up with an infinitely better product.
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User stories and clear communication of expectations really help keep the train on the rails with large scope projects
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Highly capable teams create dramatically better products than highly skilled individuals.
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Narrative development can provide an incredibly solid backbone to support artists
