Lightmare

Lightmare
Lead Designer | Associate Producer
Developed in Unreal 4

What It Is

Lightmare is a 3D action game built in the Unreal 4 engine. The player plays as Miranda, who has awoken in a strange place that cannot possibly be reality. She will wander the area in search for clues and a way to get back to reality while fending off monsters with her new-found powers.

The Design

I designed this game to be something simple because of the following reasons:

I wanted to try to make a 3D action game because I have never done one, before
I wanted to put my skills and knowledge to practice and polish them
I wanted to give the art team a lot of space to make high fidelity art because this is their portfolio piece

What we ended up with was a very solid 3D action game with very nice art.

Quick Info

I was the Lead Designer and Associate Producer for this project
It was a Senior game project for DigiPen
The team consisted of 5 artists, 2 engineers, and 2 designers including me
The development cycle was 8 months
It was built in Unreal 4

What I Did

I programmed large parts of the game:

Player character's mechanics
Traps' and enemies' gameplay logic
Blueprints for level design workflow purposes (sliding doors, foliage generator, actor instancing with dynamic materials, and many others)
On-rails camera system

I also helped produce for the game during its early stages:

I kept track of who was doing what and and their deliverables
I ran team meetings
I created schedules
I planned mitigations for any risks assessed for the overall production of the game

The Team

Brandon Burt
Brendon Clifford
Connor Day
Kevin Giang
James McWhirter
Aerik Lansel
Sammi Pearson
Chuck Silvers
Rhiannon Vickers
Jie ee Quek

Art Director, Concept Artist
Graphics Programmer
Environment Artist
Lead Designer
Environment Artist, VFX
Animator
Character Modeler
A.I. Programmer
Producer
Level Designer

Proof-of-Concept

Proof-of-concept that we can actually build the game with the game design and mechanics in place. (Using placeholder assets from Unreal 4)

Alpha

Overall level layout has been completed.

Beta

Fleshing out the art space and cleaning up level design. We actually cut out a chunk of the game to reduce workload and to tighten the flow of the game experience.

Early Development Prototyping

One of the first things I developed was the 3D on-rails camera system. I designed it to be dynamic and easy to use within the level editor.

The way it's designed to be used was it needed 3 components: The camera blueprint itself, and 2 points of references. The user would then specify different properties for the camera in its settings.