Game Designer: Tavern Crawl
I was a game designer on Tavern Crawl, a capstone project during my final year of school. We had a team of 30 student developers including 4 students from the Berkley School of Music.
We built the game using: Unreal Engine 4, GitHub, and Asana.
We launched in May 2022 and by January 2023 we had 38,000 license activations and 10,000 downloads with playtime!
How I contributed:
Worked with a initial small group as a level designer. Created the initial prototype level which was pitched to industry developers to greenlight the project.
Once full development started I contributed the following:
Block-outs for the opening areas of the first level. Helped with set dressing those areas as well.
Set dressed sections of the Hub focusing on the entrances to the Toad Road and Rat Warrens.
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.
Collaborated with Art, Narrative, and Code teams and eagerly collected feedback on my work.
What I learned:
Playtesting and iteration is key but so is controlling scope. Especially as a game’s content continues to expand, this can lead to some area getting less attention then they need to really shine.
The vision for a game starts to get ambiguous across larger teams, communication and documentation become crucial to maintain a collective goal.
About the game:
Tavern Crawl is a student-made, 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 delicious and useful cocktails. When the alcohol mysteriously dries up, Fish volunteers to leave his home and investigate where the precious resource has gone.
A full playthrough of the game can be found here.
What I would do differently:
Cut content. We created too much content to deliver a consistently polished experience. If I could go back I would advocate for cutting out the not so great levels and continue to polish ones we really nailed.
Way more playtesting! We didn’t get the game in front of enough people. General bugs, difficulty spikes, and issues with controls would have been more apparent if we had more playtesting outside the team before release.
Screenshots and design artifacts (Opening level)
Proposed level design for the prototype, we ended up removing the 3rd section and replacing it with a small platforming challenge instead.
Initial level design for the first post-prototype milestone. This expands on the initial prototype's general flow and really focuses on being a rapid intro to the game's mechanics.
Very first area in the game, I painted the foliage, path, and set up collision / obstacles.
Clearing before the player enters the sewers they learn how to climb, pick up items and basic combat skills. I blocked out the platforming challenge here.
First area where the player can choose where to explore. I blocked out this 4-way intersection and the two areas to the left and right. Forwards continues the level towards more tutorials and the first boss. To the left a side challenge I created and to the right a combat arena minigame.
Entrance to a side platforming challenge I blocked out, I also placed the booze pickups.
The side challenge starts with the player falling into the room and landing on the first platform. I wanted the player to be able to look down into the room so they could judge if they wanted to commit or not.
Layout of the side challenge, the player lands from the pipe on the right side and has to reach the top.
After exploring in the dark we take a quick pause to remind players that they are in a sewer.
Screenshots and design artifacts (Final level, other areas)
Area just before entering the final city level, I set up the blockout and level streaming for this section.
One of the key things I wanted for the final level was a nice vista moment as the player emerged from the pipe.
Blockout for the final boss area, plenty of room for the player to move and evade, pillars are destructible and offer cover from the slower and powerful blows of the Rat King.
Final boss room in the final game
Set dressing for the entrance to the Rat Warrens level.
Set dressing for the area just past the Toad Road entrance.
Quick presentation I made to pitch the design for the final level of the game.
I blocked out the level and it went under a big transformation for the final game while still keeping it’s major beats I initially outlined.