Rachel Folasayo Oladoyin
Game Designer, Level Designer and Artist
Troubled Waters
My submission for brackeys Game Jam 2024.2
This was a project from a week long game jam, and the design challenge was to design a game based off of the prompt " The Calm Before the Storm". My team and I designed a rhythm game based on keeping a boat afloat in a storm, representing the mental storm people go through during the calm before a physical storm in life.
Project Duration: 1 week
Team Size: 6 people
Platform: PC
My Roles: Game Designer, Sound Designer, Artist, Project Manager
My responsibilities
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Facilitated team meetings and brainstorming sessions, assigned tasks to team members, checked in on team members to ensure everyone was on the right track and ensured the trello board we used was kept up to date.
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Collaborated with the musician to integrate music with gameplay beats so that the game had good cadence.
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Designed gameplay sprites.
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Collaborated with the rest of the team to come up with an idea that was on theme and within scope.
Design Process overview
Early process work
Our early design process involved:
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Brainstorming, first individually, then combining all our ideas as a group.
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Making sketches to describe our personal mental images of what we wanted the game to look like.
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Choosing an idea to go with and refining the idea as a group.
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Finding references and making concept art for the level.
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Implementing our designs and ideas into a simple prototype for playtesting.
Later process work
Our later design process involved:
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Playtesting, takinging notes of what we observe and iterating on the game based off of those notes.
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Designing the score, with beats that correlate well with gameplay, allowing for good cadence.
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Integrating the final art assets.
Detailed Design Process
Early Process work
Brainstorming
The first thing we did as a group after outlining our skills was brainstorm - first individually, then we brought our ideas together as a group, so we would all have the chance to get our ideas out and have the chance to be heard.
We did this using Miro to make it easier to get ideas down quickly in a shared space:
Screenshot of the miro board from our group brainstorming session. Click to enlarge.
The next part of brainstorming we did was coming up with sketches that portrayed our individual mental models of what the game would look like. We then all presented these sketches to the rest of the team and voted on which one we liked the most. This was how we were able to come up with a main direction for our game.
Screenshot of the sketch of my personal mental model that I presented to my team. Click to enlarge.
Concepting
After brainstorming and deciding what direction we were heading in as a team, we started gathering references and making concept art of what we wanted the game to look like. After we had all the references and concepts together, we were able to make and playtest our first prototype.
Some of the references we collected early in the design process that we chose to base our design on. Click to enlarge.
Some concepts we made during the early design process. Click to enlarge.
Later Process Work
Playtesting
After we made our first prototype, we were able to playtest it. We got a lot of feedback on what needed to change to improve the gameplay experience, so we immediately got back to work implementing the feedback we got from the playtests.
Art Assets and Sound
Once we finished implementing the feedback from the playtests, we implemented the final art assets and score. We redesigned the score to align more with the intended gameplay experience (since the score and gameplay were so deeply intertwined due to the game being a rhythm game). This involved making a document that outlined the beats needed in the game and the pace of the beats, so the score could be redesigned around those beats.
An excerpt from the beat document. This document was simply used to communicate what kinds of beats were needed in the score with the musician. Click to enlarge.
Challenges
The biggest challenge when designing this game was definitely combining level and sound design. Because the sound is so integral to the gameplay in a rhythm game, sound design and level design almost became one discipline. I had to find a way to make this make sense to myself, then communicate how things needed to work for the level and sound design to the rest of the team (especially the musician).
Lessons learned
I learned that communication doesn't always have to be done in a way that is common. When communicating the beats to the musician, I communicated with him in an unconventional way using the beat diagram. But it was able to clearly send the message, and therefore was still an effective mode of communication. I learnt to embrace out-of-the-box thinking a lot more, because sometimes the box doesn't have enough tools to deal with the problem at hand.