Genre: Platforming, Crafting
Platform: PC & Mac, single-player
Engine: Unity

Team: 4 members.
Duration: September 2021 - March 2022

Roles & Contributions
Game Designer: platforming level design, exploration-crafting game loop, narrative design, prototyping, scripting.
Game Artist, UI/UX: character designs, ui/ux, all visual assets.

My Design process — Adversity and fuzzy feelings.

• Systems of Serotonin: Game loop that surrounds the Player in magic: reagents to gather, instruments to summon, funny characters to grow close to.

• Zoned Level Design: Platforming levels embody anxiety on a vertical spectrum with calm, freeing heights, and tension on the ground level.

• Emotional Progression: Levels and crafting that progress at the Player’s own pace; whenever they want to push themselves to try something new.

Capella was created with the goal of being a lighthearted experience that hearkened back to nostalgic influences that my partner for this project and I both loved. Magical girls, frilly idols, bubblegum pop music, Maplestory, Animal Crossing (2001), and single-sitting flash games: a litany of formative media from the early 2000’s. We merged our interests and decided upon a few game seeds: a game about collecting and crafting items, a world with magical creatures like a Witch, and about sparking little joys with each little task the Player embarks upon.

However, it was imperative that the game have a sense of progression, especially when it was scoped to only have a 10-minute playtime. To this end, it’s my belief that in order to provide a moving experience, there has to be adversity. We created conflict by beginning the Witch as a loner, and decided our four mechanics, dichotomizing gathering/crafting against gifting/befriending: solitary activities and ones that require interfacing with others—self contained safety versus acts that expose oneself to the potential social disapproval, that require a certain level of bravery. Half the game is always enjoyable, but you cannot give away what you create or gain new recipes, you cannot complete the mechanical loop of the game and truly make the experience sing, without taking a scary step to interface with the other inhabitants of the game’s City.

This emotional contrast is also reflected this with the game’s map design. Most crafting reagents and visually impressive views are on the rooftops at the top of the map, while anxiety is created due to a distortion of the musical score depending on elevation and the camera angling making it difficult to know what is below at ground level where the cityfolk are. Through usability testing, we ensured the Player will be motivated by light narrative nudges, but also a desire to move against stagnation and see the game to its fullest, mechanically moving forward the game’s simple message of finding worth in human connection, even if doing so is frightening at first and takes hard work.

Prototyping.

I tested out quite a few mechanics as prototypes, including more tedious collecting and traversal mechanics that, while serotonin-inducing and playtime-expanding, would introduce too much potential for fatigue in players less resilient to grinding or busywork. It felt better to make crafting easy to execute.

On the topic of difficulty, I tested some prototypes where the Player used contextual clues like a character’s personality to give the ‘right’ gift, to inspire thoughtfulness when interacting with recipients and play to the social anxiety angle, but testing this prototype proved it was too ‘difficult’ and we found it weighed down the positivity of the experience.

Charm points were also tested out for features such as visual parallax on maps, spine animation, reagent physics, and click-and-drag map traversal. All-in-all we exited the prototyping phase with a solid grasp on what mechanics would be the most lighthearted and endearing.