Newsletter June 18th

Greetings Everybody, 

I hope the summer has been treating you well. I send out a newsletter every few months to give an update on what I have been up to. Thanks for reading, and if you have ideas on people I can talk to in the games industry, please let me know. 

I am currently writing this from Singapore, where I will be spending two months total participating in a global summer internship program. Since my last letter, which I sent out at the end of my fall quarter, a lot has happened. I am still at UC Irvine (UCI), majoring in game design. The most significant thing I have done this year aside from school has been the development of Landed, a dialogue-based narrative game driven by player choices. The game has been in development for 10 months and was created independently outside of my UCI curriculum. Working on this project has taught me more about game development than all my classes at UCI, and I am excited that Landed is almost complete. Our goal is to publish the game on Steam, the world's most popular storefront for PC games, in the next couple months. I will send a note to this group to let you know when it is live. The game has very simple controls so really anybody can play. 

How the Landed Project Started: I started working on this game at its earliest stage when my friend and fellow game design student shared her idea for a game. I worked with her doing pre-production, and we prepared a pitch for the Video Game Design Club at UCI. We decided to pitch the members of the club so that we could find people who were interested in working on the project. It has been so rewarding driving the game from first concept to pre-release.

The Game: The game is called “Landed,” and you play as a robot, Nate. Nate lives in a floating city which he discovers is falling to its destruction. While initially distraught by this ominous discovery, Nate learns of a way to save himself and others from this certain fate.

Landed’s narrative is driven by player choices. The player must convince the other members of the island of the certainty of its destruction, and then save as many people as possible from this demise over the course of 7 days before it is too late. Your decisions as Nate impact the narrative's ending, and ultimately who is, and is not, saved from the island's ultimate destruction.

Team Behind Landed

The team is composed of ten UCI students, with five core members who do most of the work. I am one of these core members, and have had my hands in almost all areas of this game’s development. My main focus has been 3D art. As the art lead, I ensure that everything art-related is consistent in quality and style, matching the overall vision of the game. I coordinate vision, tasks, planning and execution among the game’s artists.

What I Did As Lead Art Director:

Created the Artistic Vision of the Game: I guided three other 3D artists in developing the game's style, and optimized all art production to enable faster development. Usually creating a good art style requires lots of work experimenting with textures, lighting, and a lot of other things, which can be quite time consuming. The main artistic challenge for Landed was finding a way to make characters and backgrounds have a distinct look while maximizing developer efficiency. Essentially, I focused on ensuring that I didn’t create an art style that was super hard to maintain. All the 3D art for the game is made in Blender and is then exported to Unity. 

Led The Art Department: In addition to creating a lot of art myself, I assigned work to other artists, giving them reference material and specifications so that they understood exactly what they needed to do. Once artists completed their work, they sent me the untextured “plain” model, which I color while also resolving any topology issues or problems. I add a few extra details then export them to Unity.

Planned All Level Design: Utilizing the library of 3D art assets we created, I organized the game world, first starting with the most important structured locations and then adding extra details from there. Since the game reuses the same space throughout the entire game (almost all of the game world is explorable from the very start), the design of the world is very important and needs to be carefully planned out. The narrative pacing for not just one moment, but the entire game has to be taken into account when designing the map. Some considerations include: how far will the player have to be traveling back and forth, will this be boring and repetitive if I place these two important buildings too far apart? Is it clear where the player needs to go? Will players be able to find important characters or easily miss dialogue interactions? 

Drove a Pivot of Art Style Midway Through the Process: Initially Landed was going for a more realistic, detailed art style but, simply put, it was just not working. It was too labor-intensive and was not realistic to maintain for the scope of the game. There really needed to be a change as even if we did manage to complete the entire game in the game’s early style, Landed would have had very little originality to it artistically. I proposed a massive shift in the game's overall direction. My change was a complete overhaul artistically, which meant redoing all the art and reworking a significant amount of the game's story. In the end though, this new style actually decreased our workload. The new style was much easier to create assets for and solved a lot of plot holes in the narrative, allowing us to move it in a more creative direction. 

Worked Intensely with Blender and Unity: For my primary role, Landed’s 3D art is really quite simple, with all art assets being made within specific style requirements with game performance and optimization in mind. All 3D assets are made with Blender, an incredibly robust professional software package which is somehow completely free. All assets use simple materials; the only details being ascribed are each asset’s metallic properties (Smoothness, Roughness) and a simple color attribute, making it extremely easy to texture assets (saving me from having to use image textures or complex materials). 

What I Learned

It is important to only have as many team members as absolutely necessary: One would think that having more members on a team would make development go faster, since there are more people to do the work, but unfortunately the team size in several instances has actually been a large hindrance to development progress. More people created scheduling difficulties and more communication. In short, a lot more time was spent coordinating the team, time that could have been better spent on development. 

Deadlines are Crucial: This might be the most obvious statement I could possibly write but I feel it is still necessary to point out. Team members would often miss deadlines. This held up others' work which relied on the previous person's work being completed. Due to the game having a branching narrative, much of the writing had to be done linearly as later writing is based on the outcome of decisions offered to the player in previous interactions. While the game’s main story beats were planned out from start to finish because of the game’s non linear nature, the actual writing had to be done in the order in which events happen.

The Art Vision Must be Communicated Clearly: The thing that makes game development so hard is that you need everybody on your team to understand the vision of the game really well. If there is a failure in this conveyance, precious art is wasted. Nobody likes that. There was a lot of great art that wasn’t usable because either 1) I wasn’t clear enough or 2) the artist went off track, making assets that were not cohesive with the rest of the game.

Get the Important Stuff Right and Reduce Scope: Everybody has a million ideas for what could be added to a game to make it better. Differentiating between essential and extra features can be really hard, especially if you are not sure how long things will take. Every game has to do one thing well if it has any hope of being good. It took us a while to really find what that was going to be with Landed and to feel like we could get rid of the extra bloat and overscope attached to the project.

Sometimes You Have to Let Hard Work Go For the Greater Good: This was a particularly difficult lesson to learn. We had to get rid of a lot of good art for the greater good of the project. Because this was my first end-to-end project, it took me quite a while to really hone in on what the new style should be. We all held onto the realistic feel for a long time – too long, in retrospect – because we knew how to do the work and enjoyed the result, but it was too time intensive and the game would have never got done. 

Thank you everyone for getting to the end of this long email. I will send a link once we get the game live. In the meantime, you can see some screenshots of the game below.

Aidan See Images of the Game Here!