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Introduction and Overview

The journey of Pepperbox Productions was a rollercoaster ride of both fun and frustration throughout the timeline of our project. A mix of “a-ha” and “oh-no” moments, this project helped us as a team and individually collaborate over pitching an evocative game idea. It gave us an experience and opportunity to understand how tackling challenges would feel like in a professional world. Pepperbox Productions is a faculty sponsored game project that aims to create a pre-production package for a student pitch game that stakeholders would want to invest in in a hypothetical professional setting through delivering compelling art and visuals, narrative and gameplay design. We were a team of 3 designers and 3 artists. 

1. Em Tyminski
2. Saylee Bhide
3. Sheenu You
4. Brendan Valley
5. Josh Li
6. Andrew McLamb

The deliverables for our project are a comprehensive game design document that covers everything from art, gameplay, level design, UI, story, and demographic. We are also submitting an art documentation that will map our journey from inspiration to completion of our renders for character, environment, and world building props. Lastly, we will be submitting a demographic analysis of the customer base document. 

In our story, you play as Peck, a flightless bird who works at the post office in the forest. One day, many deliveries come in and need to be made throughout the surrounding areas, but none of the other delivery birds are willing to do it, so they are given to Peck to complete. They excitedly head out to prove themselves just as capable as the other birds. As Peck goes through different areas, the more they focus on using their own ingenious ways of maneuvering around biomes without being able to fly and make sure all the unique citizens they meet receive their mail, the more successful they are. They realize their success comes from them doing things their own unique way and connecting with the community they delivered to.

Our main approach was to create a well explored and well communicated document about the game for the production team in future. Since we did not have a time constraint for the production of the game, we did not limit ourselves and decided to think beyond the limits of a 14 week project semester. 

What went well

As we launched into the semester, we were given an option of either following a prompt from the advisors or pitch our own ideas without considering any bounding box. Enthusiastic to explore the game ideas space, around Week 4, we came up with our own ideas to pitch. Although we took some time ideating, throughout the process, we were happy to realize that all of the ideas were innovative and are unexplored areas in genres that are quite well established. The spirit of rebellious innovation was high from the start. Since the team went their separate ways during the ideation phase, the brainstorming process was smooth and conflict-averse. Also, we all were flexible and open to fleshing out each of the ideas which helped us explore and understand our reasoning behind our pitches in a more collaborative and well rounded way. This helped us pitch all 3 ideas collectively as a team wherein each of  us were involved and excited for every single one to come through. We believe that this was a robust initial milestone to achieve given the challenges of the vast space as well as a lack of any technical constraint in a fully remote/virtual environment.

After the selection of the pitch, the artists were quickly able to sketch out their own visualizations for our main character Peck. With continuous feedback on the shape language, characteristics, attributes and overall look from the team and advisors every week, the character iterations saw a lot of progress eventually leading to a strong character design towards the ending of the semester. It gave enough time for the 3D artist to create a 3D model from the concept art. As a validation of our strong character design, the playtest results on the playtest day were in tandem with our expectations of our character’s personality and profession. Since our game revolved around Peck, this communication indeed was an achievement we were really proud of as a team. 

Additionally, very early in the semester each of the team members had identified their forte and were dedicated to completing our individual tasks/deliverables concurrently along with the collaborative tasks. Initially, we struggled to have an efficient communication between the designers and artists since we had many aspects to cover, in addition to the core gameplay ideas being fuzzy and unresolved. However, with time, the workflow between designers and artists became more fluid and faster as seen from our world building documentation, supporting character visualizations, and level design layouts for environments. These parallel tracks enabled us to speed up the pipeline and be able to achieve most of our key goals in our project. 

The biggest note of our project was that we were NOT making a demo. Yes, you heard it right. We wanted to focus on an airtight communication of our game rather than focusing on a demo. However, throughout quarters this decision made by our faculty advisors welcomed a lot of mixed reaction from the other ETC faculty. They were not sure as to how we were going to convey the feel of our game. The pressing question was “how are you going to show your mechanics?” One of our designers got down to building a demo that would communicate the base mechanics of our game. We did not plan to provide this as a deliverable, but only as a medium to show the mechanics. This served us really well towards the end since it was able to show off the mechanics just enough for the audience to understand. 

We did not want to cross the line between a pre-production package and a production package. However, we realized that communicating through documentation would be slightly risky and therefore we decided to create foundational mockups of each of our domains. We had all the elements to be carried forward to 3D, but it was on the production team to take it further by drawing inspiration from it and actually building it. Similar to the demo, the level designer on our team designed level design grey boxes for each of the biomes in our game world. We believe that this along with the concept art will now be able to give a clear picture to the next team about both look, feel and playability of this game. Overall, we feel that although this project might take more than 14 weeks to complete, the scope of it has been well documented and explored in the game design document made by our designers. The GDD is an extensive piece of documentation containing everything from the story, characters, gameplay, mechanics, level design and UI. We believe this would help the future teams to get a big picture of our game and be able to scope it the way they want. 

What could have been better

Our game was inspired by Kiki’s delivery service and Mario Odyssey. As we were brainstorming about our story, we took several different paths and got slightly lost in the scope of our game. The focus went away from story and more towards gameplay and art due to time constraints and requirements. We had different paths for stories, but we never really sat down and discussed as a team each of our thoughts until much later. We were yet to decide if our characters had a personality and both the design and art team had different views about the same. After talking to our advisors and our outside friend Kate, we were finally able to come to a conclusion. However, it was a little too late in the semester to really nail down the story beats. We feel that dedicating a good chunk of time to hammering down the story would have helped us in not only having a concrete storyline to bank on but also be able to reduce the competition of resources between design, art and story.

Moving onto level design, the team struggled somewhat throughout the semester. Level design and gameplay design almost always go hand in hand in a real-life professional setting. Level design serves gameplay while gameplay checks if the levels squeeze out every ounce of potential gameplay. The problem with this semester long is that there is simply not enough time to figure out either to a shippable standard to pass onto a production team as references. For example, levels that lean towards a wide-linear progression requires a different design mindset from traditional platformer levels that stress clear and narrow level progression. Meanwhile, the design team had to come up with new and fresh gameplay mechanics that work well with the levels. Having these two essential elements under development is no easy task.

Lessons learned

As mentioned above, the story should be focused in the initial leg of the project irrespective of the subject matter of your game. It is very crucial to sit together and nail down the story beats. This would also help to create a mockup of how level works if you have a visualization of the story. Approaching the story from different angles is key to ideation. Continual feedback from advisors and peers is also important for eventually having a concrete storyline. The second lesson we learnt was that, regardless of whether the pre-production package was going to be used by the next team or not, it is important to not overscope your project. Since we did not have any constraints we were thinking big. The time challenges we faced could have been mitigated had we constrained ourselves much earlier. Creating a timeline for the project along with identifying key milestones and deliverables during the start of the project would have been beneficial to bring the scope in perspective. It is also important to create a fluid communication channel between the designers and artists. Establishing that would help reduce conflicts, communication gap and effective use of resources. Lastly, as a pre production package team we were not sure how we should be balancing time and resources between ideation and brainstorming. A schedule of some kind would have really helped us in this situation. 

In terms of level design, a good thing to keep in mind, especially for designing platformers, is “Kishōtenketsu”. ‘Ki‘ / introduction: a new mechanic or situation is introduced in the leve. This part of the level essentially demonstrates to the players how this new mechanic works. Players then try out the new mechanic in a safe and controlled environment to get familiar with it. ‘Sho‘ / development: The next section of the level features the same mechanics. Gone is the “safety net” in the previous section that guarantees player progression. The solution to these new challenges stays the same, but to proceed further the game demands more from player skills. ‘Ten‘ / twist: The mechanic introduced and developed in the previous section of the level is now turned on its head, requiring the players to think from a new perspective in order to solve these new challenges. ‘Ketsu‘ / Conclusion: All types of the previous challenges are gathered here for a final test of player skill. However, these challenges are not as hard as the “Ten” section. The goal here is to give the player a sense of achievement.

Overall this project was a different experience of its own. Certainly a challenging one but with massive learning rewards. We all got to explore our own interest areas further along with learning the skill of collaborative working in a remote environment. Despite the challenges, we are now close to completing all our deliverables with extensive work to show. Although we had lots of opposing views, we also had innumerable interesting and fun conversations. As mentioned earlier, we grew both in our domains and as collaborators. To conclude, we were able to bring an interesting idea into this world as a team, an idea we all loved and were proud of – which made this game something we all are confident of looking forward to if it ever went in production!

Week 13 is about softs with the entire faculty group, taking in their feedback and finalizing art, design and documentation. We want to package all our work into a detailed watertight parcel to make the onboarding process for the next team as hustle-free as possible.

The team was happy to find that the faculty group in general was quite interested in our game, or at least the prototype we have created so far. The most important issue to address before the final presentation is for the team to come up with a comprehensible storyboard for the core gameplay loop so that people with varying degrees of understanding of “platformer” games could all understand the gist of the project quickly. Addressing this issue will help us a lot in preparing for the final presentation and give everyone a better overview of the story and narrative.

Looking at design documentation, the GDD (game design document) has grown up to a 70-page encyclopedia where every potential problem imagabile has been answered. The idea is to paint a picture of the game as clearly as possible, and not leaving any space in terms of the core gameplay.

The team has also made much progress in finishing up our Art, along with final Environment Art and Model Sheets. All of them are available on the shared Google Drive to showcase the iteration process. This will allow the next team’s artists to quickly pick up where our artists left off.

Finally, every semester-long project is not complete without some serious introspection of the process. In the upcoming post-mortem, we will discuss the triumph as well as the hardships of our project, and where improvements could be made. Please look forward to it:)

Week 12 is our last week of finishing major work on design and art before soft opening where the team put together the finishing touches on design documentation and artwork. Additionally, the team is putting together a 3-min trailer video that succinctly explains what our game is about.

The team does not have the bandwidth and time to completely finish all the concept art for all the characters in the game, so we will leave that part of the game design document a bit open so the next team could have some space to determine which direction they would love to go.

On the art side, the team has finished modeling and coloring Peck’s model, as well as coming up with a model sheet for Peck that includes a variety of Poses. The purpose of this is so that when the faculty asks the question: “How does peck fight?”, they could take a look at this model sheet and then have a crystal clear image in their head. In addition to Peck’s model sheet, the team is also thinking about coming up with model sheets for some of the key NPC characters that will populate the woodland city. One more benefit of having a model sheet is that the 3D artists next semester will  be able to understand how to create these characters in a 3D model.

Moving to the design team, the first draft of the game design document is finished. At this point, the team came to the realization that to convince the faculty that this is a fun and cute game to “play”, the team almost certainly needs to showcase a level relatively late in the game where all tricks and skills of the player are put into test. The design team will work on such a level next week that combines all the aforementioned needs.

Thinking about next week, we will have softs where the team will sit down with faculty, and discuss how to best finish our project with the time remaining.

This week the team is focusing on the upcoming “soft” presentation. Whether the team would show progress with a traditional pitch presentation or in a surprisingly unique way; or whether we would simply go through our thought process are decisions that needed to be made.

On the design side of things, the team is almost done with a first draft of the GDD (game design document). Taking in feedback from our faculty advisors, the design team needs to include a clear and concise table of contents for the ease of perusing regardless of the audience/reader. The purpose of doing this is to give a clear overview of the project as well as an implication of what is included in the pre-production package. In addition to the inclusion of a table of contents, the GDD also needs to include a broader aspect of the project, including but not limited to: demographic analysis, art style, estimation of production timeline etc.

On the art side, the team has finished the modeling of the game’s protagonist, more concepts art for props that exist in the game world are coming in, as well as environment concept art that encapsulates the core feeling of the game. 

Looking into next week, the team will make sure that every aspect of the project is ready for scrutiny of “soft” presentation.

Week 10 was focused on thinking about what to include in terms of art and design assets and documentations for the pre-production package and adding upon, accordingly,  what the team has already accomplished. Feedback from playtest sessions have been very helpful in enlightening aspects of the project where the team might have overlooked.

With not much time remaining until softs, the design team decided to clean up all aspects of the design and formalize them into the first draft of the GDD (game design document). The meeting with former level designer at Blizzard Joshua Kurtz helped the design team see clearly issues that still needed to be addressed in a typical level. For example: 

1. Our demo of the Core level/gameplay loop needs to showcase the main character bringing happiness to the community.
2. Levels should achieve balance between sandboxy exploration and representing nature settings in a cartoony style. 
3. Levels, as of right now, lack a holistic/unforced conversation with the areal codes system the team proposed. If the system is to stay, levels should be built having the codes system in mind. 
4. Levels currently miss checkpoints. They should be strategically placed along the golden path to encourage progression, but not frustrate.
5. Especially for the early tutorial levels: teaching players how to play the game is the key. Levels should be split into section/little chunks with each section’s tutorial goals in-sight. Tutorials should cover all the basic mechanics of the game.
6. What does the natural transition between biomes look like?

Looking at the art side, the team is taking in the feedback from playtest sessions and iterating on the final look of character, props and environment. We want to make sure all finalized art is clear and easily scalable for the next team. For example, our main character’s color palette should Stay away from purples. We need to invert vibrancy on the face and body. We need to answer the question: “ How many of the props concepts will be used by players vs how many are meant to ground the world up?” “How are the textures going to look like? What level of detail?”

Week 8 for the team was focused on zoning in on the specifics for both art and design.

From an art perspective, we started honing in on the final look of our bird protagonist, what we wanted the player character to look like. The general shape and shape language for the character have already been decided, what remains is deciding the color palette, turf of feather on the body for extra character expression etc.

The team needs to make sure these characters support the feel of the game and what it is trying to give the player. Interestingly though, our faculty advisors expressed that they did not feel the sense of “gratitude” being felt through the other NPC characters. This means the team will need to, if time allows, unify the art style for all characters to nail down the comedic and light-hearted nature of the game. 

In terms of design, the team has iterated on the details on gameplay mechanics and the world building even further and has created so far 3 level blockmeshes for gameplay testing as well as conveying the feeling of the world. The faculty loved the overall world building and the overall world map. However, the team should prioritize the districts and define more clearly what each the level is. Thinking about the game arch is very important. One caution to be aware of, they pointed out, was that, given your audience, the game world should not feel like a mixed puzzle. If the game becomes a puzzle game where we are trying to solve this cryptography that’s not where the team should land. 

Furthermore, a lot of the discussion was on the style of presentation for the narrative and the story. One one hand, the team wants to depict the main character as the receiving end of NPC characters’  behaviors and actions, or in other words, a somewhat mute character like Mario who nevertheless conveys a strong personality; On the other hand, the faculty advisors would love to see a main character that front and center, which comes down to making a bold choice with what the main character is. “It is easier to create characters that are not consequential to the story. You are avoiding the tough question.” as how the faculty advisors put it. The faculty wished we were talking more about what the character itself is doing since the main plot points of the game is about this bird character. “Other characters can only be evaluated in comparison to what the main character sounds or looks like.”

Overall, it is a super charming story – but it needs a personality. If the character is mostly receiving action then it’s not the protagonist. Our protagonist should be working towards an objective. Our bird protagonist already has a personality from the drawings. So Peck will need to drive the story, otherwise we will just have a stupid ass bird. If he is not charming he will seem useless. If he is not specific no one is going to care. It’s important to be specific. 

Week 7 is the time for halves presentation and taking in halves feedback while zoning in more specifically on all aspects of pre-production. The team was able to turn faculty’s previously lukewarm responses and expectations into something more positive. Overall, the faculties liked what we have done in the past 6 weeks. This greatly helped the team morale and validated a lot of art and design decisions the team has made. More specifically, the faculties loved the environment art and world building, as well as linking in-game character capabilities with real life animal analogies.

On the other hand, there are many smaller points and details that needed to be addressed. As of right now, the main bird character does not visually register as a  flightless bird. Additionally,  it looks like a specific kind of bird. This visual statement can be taken at face value. There is nothing wrong with it being a bit more vague so that the team doesn’t get tied down with any initial expectation from the audience. If we still want to go down this path, we need to make it clearer. The team discussed solutions that could address the issue.

While the game the team envisioned is not heavy on the story but rather filled with small bits of lore for the player to discover, the faculty somehow got the impression that the game is a narrative focused emotional experience that tells a serious story. There is a clear gap between what is expected and what is planned down the road. The faculty advised the team to use animatics/short animation or storyboard sequences that visually convince the audience of the tone and complexity of the game. As to how the team would love to take in this piece of advice on future direction is still unclear.

In terms of target demographic, 5-12 is a fairly wide target demographic. The bottom line of the range can’t really have text to read or navigate complex space as much as the high end of this range. Meanwhile what inspires an emotional reaction in x population is a question the team needs to answer.

Lastly, the team needs to decide what the actual platform on which the game will ship, otherwise there is no way to come up with a reasonable budget estimate. Having a delivery platform is a big red flag. 

The team received a B+ on product and a B+ on presentation. That’s a great grade for halves. In short, this  week was more focused on tweaking than major changes/breakthroughs as Our Halves presentation and feedback was the main focus of the week.

Week 6 is all about polishing all discipline and preparing for our halves presentation next week. The team narrowed down the most important aspects of our pre-production process so far into the Art, Story, Mechanism and Level Design.In our halves slide, we detailed the journey of our process through each of the disciplines, from brainstorming of the most basic core concepts to our current state. We finished off the slide with a brief section proposing future plans for the project.

Starting with the Art team, they will continue to iterate on all characters and environments in the game while working closely with the design team to ensure thematic consistency. For instance, the art team has begun to bring to life all the side characters we plan to include in the game. On the environment side, the art team has found the sweet spot/a certain style for the woodland creature village. This style was positively received by the faculty advisor. The team will then continue in that direction.

The art team is currently following an iteration process where the team sits down with the faculty advisors at the end of every other day to go over new character and environment concept arts for feedback.

Moving on to the Design team. The design team is split into the following 3 sub sections: Narrative, Mechanics and Level. In narrative design, the team has decided not to have an overarching storyline, which focuses on how a specific journey unfolds, for the protagonist. Rather, the game tells the story through lore and little snippets of character interactions here and there to build this rich world of woodland creatures. This approach to storytelling presents a much less daunting task, both in terms of the quantity of written text required as well as the creative freedom it offers.

In mechanics design, the team decided to keep only the most essential verbs for the sake of simplicity. The more verbose and crowded a system is, the more obtuse and cumbersome it becomes. The team, in other words, is following Nintendo’s approach of mechanics design: “simple, but versatile verbs”. Lastly, in level design, the team has built out an entire prototype level depicting the woodland creature village. The goal of the level is to test out how big we want each level to be, and how gameplay could unfold in that environment. The team wants to ground the forest setting by having actual platforms built out of trees, instead of simply putting out a platform that merely floats in the air. Additionally, the start and the finish of the level, namely where the player enters the level and where they should deliver the packages, are instantly obvious when they jump into the level. However it is up to the player to find their delivery path in this area. This design more effectively holds play interest.

See you in halves!

Week 5 is about digesting faculty feedback from the previous week and delivering the first round of concept arts and prototypes. Addressing a lot of the shared confusions among the faculties, the team, in one way or another, has to make a prototype of the game. The catch is that the prototype should not be a polished gameplay demo (which simply takes too much time to build), but is able to convey the feeling and the tonality of the game right away so that everyone, with or without a background in game development, could understand.

Beginning with the art, we began to flesh out the role of the “delivery bird” character in terms of both look and characteristics. On the art side, our artists created multiple sketches of what a “flightless delivery bird” may look like, and what it may carry around utility wise to facilitate the job. Later we came together to discuss aspects we liked and liked less from each design. This helped the whole team arrive at a unified vision of the delivery bird character. Besides character art, the team presented several tentative sketches on what the environment could look like, each offering a different take on the forest village. The internal and external (with faculty advisor) art reviews proved to be quite helpful in narrowing down directions. The team will for sure have more sessions like this in the future. The next step for the art team will be to iterate on character designs and drawing more environment art.

Moving onto game mechanics and gameplay, we created 4 platformer level prototypes to explore the possibilities of fun platforming challenges set in a forest. Research on previous platformer games in a forest setting shows that a lot of them are not leveraging the forest setting enough that the gameplay feels new and fresh. Therefore the team decided to experiment with greyboxing in MAYA to hash out level design possibilities. One of the first level prototypes was a waterfall scene with protruding rocks and tree branches as platforms. Our faculty advisors did not advise against the idea per se, but suggested that we should focus more on creating a traversal situation in the forest, a typical level scenario that more convincingly conveys the theme of the game. Besides, the design team have made many specific design decisions that funnel into the level design process, such as what gliding looks and functions like, what combat encounters could play out, and how is the game world structured just to mention a few.

We wanted to have rather complete concepts and prototype on both level design and character & environment art to show by the end of next week to prepare for halves (midterms) presentation. Having work-in-progress that could convey and tone of the game to faculties is where our priorities lie.