Checkout the design breakdown: here

Play it: here

Mariana | Capstone Project By Crabs Nest

Responsibilities: Game Design, Level Design, Creative Lead, Modeling, Documentation

Tools: Unity, Trello, SourceTree, FMOD, Blender

About: Mariana is an underwater action horror game created by my capstone team Crabs Nest. The game involves exploring a now decrepit underwater facility overrun by monsters. The game is linear in fashion and involves solving puzzles, listening to audio logs and avoiding or fighting monsters.

Early in development I pitched an idea for an underwater horror game to my capstone team and managed to sell the rest of my team on the concept, I was also given the role of creative lead to ensure the projects vision remained consistent. In those role I emphasized the need to sell the setting such as having underwater sequences and a primary weapon unique to the setting. I mediated disagreements, found compromises when possible, worked with the writing team to ensure the writing was thematically consistent and was the deciding factor in design stalemates for my team. I also worked with my teams project lead in terms of documentation and scheduling to ensure we were hitting our development milestones.

Beyond my duties as a creative lead, I took an active role in the games level design. Due to the limitations of time for the project it was important to condense but maintain a consistent pace throughout the two levels we created. I worked with other team members who were part of level design to create LDDs, assist with metrics, create grey boxes, play test and sign off and test their work as well. I did however take the primary role in doing the lighting for the game and went through several lighting passes throughout development, tweaking the lighting to capture the correct tone.

Finally I did work on QA to catch various bugs the game had and report it to our programmers as well as some light 3D modeling when the necessity had arisen.

Takeaways: This is project I pitched and took one of the leading roles on early in development. It was great to hone my level and encounter design throughout the course of development. The team I have worked with has a great rapport with each other. We remained consistently on time with our deliverables and accountable of each other. The result was a well designed game that often received positive feedback and plenty of great reactions from it.