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Overview
Overview
Digital Audio Wasteland or DAW, is a whimsical music exploration game about wandering the ruins of a world gone by and rediscovering the songs within it. Players uncover and then mix beats to solve problems and make friends. The player explores a semi-open world, selecting the area they want to explore from a world map.
Acted as a Design Lead and Vision Holder.
Communicated and collaborated with engineers to achieve the team's vision.
Wrote and maintained design documentation for mechanics and tone
Concepted core mixing mechanic referencing research on casual creativity
Collaborated with a team of designers to discover the game's design pillars and create mechanics that emphasized them.
Designed the Tutorial level in collaboration with a team of artists.
Implemented dialog text effect systems including type-writer text scrolling and in-line text flair.
Mixing System:
Mixing System:
The mechanic at the core of DAW's design is the mixing. Players drag tapes from their library to build a song's beat. Each tape carries a set of stats that will change how the song interacts with the world. One of the major issues we had while working with this was how to make sure that the system felt both like they were making music and was not too daunting. So to solve this I referenced research on creativity and how systems feel simple to use. One of the major takeaways was about making the choices and changes obvious. This influenced the design of our tapes and the types of sounds stored within them.
Dialogue Effects:
Dialogue Effects:
To give our dialogue some character, we wanted to have two key features. The first to be implemented was custom text materials. After some research, I found that the best way to do this was to utilize Unreal Engine's Rich Text. Using Unreal's material system, I created a few examples and types of text styles we might want. The second feature was scrolling typewriter styled text. The best way to implement this in the time we had was to print out a substring of the full text and increase the length on a short interval. This implementation caused an issue with displaying Unreal's Rich Text as it only adds a text effect when it could fully read the syntax. For example <Bold>Bold</> would find the Bold text style in the table and apply effect to the text inside of it. However, when we increment through the full string character by character, the full syntax doesn't exist and the system would output garbage. To fix this I did some basic text parsing with blueprints to clean and remake the dialogue string to apply the Rich Text style to each character of the relevant text.
2025-03-17 01-23-26.mp4Level Design Documents:
Level Design Documents:
I was responsible for working on both the Tutorial area and writing the document which would define the requirements for a level. My main concerns while writing it were, to make sure it was clear, make sure that all maps had similar but not exact tones, and to try to keep them within scope. To do this I posed the requirements as questions, to both get the designers thinking about their levels if they hadn't already and to create an easy checklist if anything was outside of scope and tone.
Tutorial Level Design:
Tutorial Level Design:
I owned the design and implemented any additional features for the tutorial level. During the mapping of the level, my main concern was to teach the player all the fundamentals they would need to interact with the rest of the game. To achieve this the layout is designed around two very strict gates. The first gate is a simple puzzle that seeks to teach the player how to pick up objects and that objects will be used to solve puzzles. I think the intro section and the immediate hallway after it succeeded in teaching players what they needed to know. First-time players and testers would always be able to progress and understand the intended lessons, so I'm confident this section of the space is working.
However, I feel the rest of the space and the second gate did not teach players what they needed to know. The goal was to open up the space and get players used to exploring an area to make progress. To achieve that the player is encouraged towards the blocked tunnel above them through signposting, composition, and telling the player directly through an NPC. Many players did not understand what their goal was and I think that is a fault of the level design. When the player spawns the view is blocked by a chain-link fence and then their attention is stolen by batteries falling out of an overhanging truck. Because of this players are not noticing what the camera is directing them to. I think a more aggressive camera movement, clearing the view, and or changing the timing of the batteries would all be possible solutions to this point. In pre-launch playtesting, players would walk past, our NPC, John Tutorial. I did end up solving this issue by adding popups that players were required to interact with, in this case telling players that they can talk to NPCs. But a popup wasn't enough so behind the trigger for the popup I placed a tape, a sub-objective players were taught about at the start. This worked, players were talking to the NPC, but enough of them were not reading the dialogue. So while I solved the interaction, the information was still not being consistently taught. And this was the issue I never found a solution for. I think that if I could solve the other pain points we might have enough redundancy to solve that issue.
TutorialPlaythrough.mp4
DAW_BRoll_2.mp4Page updated
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