Mu and The Little Reef
Technical Designer / Creative Director
Sept 2019 - April 2020 (8 months) | 16 person team | Unreal Engine 4
Mu’s Garden is a third-person gardening adventure built in Unreal Engine 4. Play as Mu, a new sea god, to cultivate and harvest underwater plants to restore a once beautiful, but now abandoned, fishy city.
As the technical designer and creative director for this project, my tasks included:
As the technical designer and creative director for this project, my tasks included:
- Developed a tool for creating urban buildings, deprecated due to a new, organic architectural style.
- Using HackNPlan's Design Model to document systems and objects, outlining gameplay needs for the entire team.
- Prototype fruits, which have modular interactions with each other and characters to create emergent gameplay.
- Usability testing that informs input changes for object interaction.
- Modeled rough versions of the plants with BSP for artists to turn into functional meshes later.
- Integrated our VFX artist's particle systems with our plants and fruits
- Developed other interactive objects in the world including urchins, bubble algae, and pesky fish.
Blueprint sample: sweet plant item
Above is my second pass at a Blueprint for one of the physical, systemic objects produced by plants. Once picked up, this sweet item has a "grace period" before fish begin swarming the player and eating the item from their hands.
These items are built to be simple and highly modular, with the potential to interact with many different objects in the game world. This fuels the experimental, sandbox gameplay we're aiming for.
These items are built to be simple and highly modular, with the potential to interact with many different objects in the game world. This fuels the experimental, sandbox gameplay we're aiming for.
Retention Design Document
I created this document for a class in retention design, focusing on how the game will keep players engaged. Some of these designs were implemented by our team, others are possible expansions the team could make to engage a wider audience and fund the game's development, were it a commercial title. This document details:
- Core gameplay
- Progression through planting and exploring
- Economy- find and earn money to spend on NPC services, cosmetics
- Social- play cooperatively in a safe space with others
- Studio costs (for a commercial development)
- Monetization strategies and implementation