Game Designer: Tavern Crawl
Tavern Crawl was a capstone project for my final year of school. We had 30 student developers including 4 students from the Berkley School of Music.
We launched in May 2022 and by January 2023 we had 38,000 license activations and 10,000 downloads with playtime!
We built the game using: Unreal Engine 4, Git, and Asana.
How I contributed:
Worked with an initial group of 7 as a level designer. Created the initial prototype level which was pitched to industry developers who greenlight the project.
During development I contributed the following:
Block-outs for the opening areas of the first level.
Helped to design & block-out the Hub. Also set dressed entrances to the Toad Road and Rat Warrens areas.
Conducted feature research and collaborated with fellow designers to create fun core gameplay features like cocktail crafting, and Booze levels
Implemented a overhead marker mechanic via blueprints. This showed chat bubbles and exclamation points above NPC heads to help guide the player and encourage NPC conversation.
About the game:
Tavern Crawl is an action adventure game starring Fish, a young countryside mouse who dreams of adventure. His kingdom uses alcohol collected from the city they live below as currency, fuel for fires, and resources to craft deliciously useful cocktails. When the alcohol mysteriously dries up, Fish volunteers to leave his home and investigate where the precious resource has gone.
Lessons learned:
Metrics are critical - Building a stronger set of metrics for jump distances & other level elements would’ve avoided a lot adjusting to lower our platforming difficulty.
Know when to cut content - We created too much content to deliver a consistently polished experience. I could’ve advocated for cutting out the not so unique levels and continued to polish ones that highlighted our gameplay / world.
More playtesting - We didn’t get the game in enough hands pre-release. General bugs, difficulty spikes, and issues with controls would have been more apparent with increased testing.
Opening Level Breakdown
This was my proposed design for the opening level, it was built on the foundation from our prototype. I pitched this design to team and we decided to move forward with it.
It focused on these covering these elements:
Introducing movement, combat, cocktail crafting
Keeping the level simple to not overwhelm the player while they are learning
Ensuring good pacing and giving time in between learning & combat encounters.
In the final game we expanded the initial player start area. This was done for a number of reasons:
The player can better visually contextualize Fish’s story & it gave space for an intro cutscene.
Allowed me to design a larger tutorial area which better fit the narrative (Fish is re-learning his skills ahead of his journey into the sewers).
The top image shows the very start of the game immediately after the initial intro cutscene. Players can see the sewers ahead and follow a short path to reach its entrance.
The bottom image shows the main tutorial area, players learn how to use weapons, collect booze / cocktails and safely practice platforming.
Junction & Side Challenge Breakdown
After a more linear tutorial area we open up the map and allow for exploration. I blocked out this 4 way junction and designed a side challenge that connects to it.
To progress forwards the player simply continues straight, this builds off the linear nature of the earlier section and reinforces that moving forwards = progression.
These sewer pipes are huge compared to Fish and helps sell the scale of our world. This is the first time the sewers open up so it pushes the message of “yes there is a big world to explore here!”
If the player goes left at the junction they’ll run into a platforming side challenge I designed. This side challenge is the first test of platforming the player can encounter after the tutorial.
The entrance is a minor leap of faith, players can see platforms on the other side of the pipe if they look down. Once they land they need to climb and jump up the platforms to the top. Once at the top they jump back into a pipe and land right back where they started.
I had the following goals in mind:
It’s close to the tutorial so keep it simple and satisfying
I added lots of booze pickups and used the largest pickup size at the end.
Make it feel more scary or challenging than it really was.
The pipe down is not that much larger than Fish is, we go from a really big space to a more claustrophobic, tighter space. At the end we release this tension by landing back in the larger space.
Looking back I would change the following:
Make the overall space slightly larger so the camera has more room to breathe in certain spots.
Adjust the platforms and ropes to make it slightly easier and make sure the ropes aren’t in the camera’s way.
Use the environment more to communicate the affordance of the entrance.
The throne room contains the game’s final boss battle.
The Rat King is slower compared to Fish but has devastating attacks. Giving the player space to move around & cover to hide behind allows them to even the playing field.
This initial blockout didn’t change too much compared to the final version. I used can assets and a slightly lowered section of floor to create this pool of booze that the Rat King has been hoarding. Pillars are a classic architectural element of many throne rooms around the world & here they provide destructible cover.
Final Level & Boss Room Breakdown
The last stop on Fish’s journey is the royal city of Murine, where the Rat King has taken power. I created a quick slide deck to sell the idea of Murine. I wanted to cover the ideas behind the city’s sections and possible gameplay beats throughout.
The city section of the level changed quite dramatically from start to finish but the core gameplay beats remained. The level artists really nailed & elevated the whole area.
Below you can see the initial vista I blocked out vs the final version.