PROJECT SUMMARY
Jumplight Odyssey, a unique rogue-lite sci-fi colony sim developed in Unity3D. Gather survivors, repair and build out your starship, brave black holes, and fend off attacks, all while managing the daily soap opera of your colorful crew.
My contributions on this project included
•Level design and building for several starship types
•Design of the game's build mode system and construction system
•Design for tech unlock system
•Other ship and spatial related systems
•AI implementation
•Content design and implementation
•Economy balancing
•User research
•UI/UX support
•Mentoring
•Prototyping and pre-production
•Logo and marketing materials
PROJECT DETAILS
On this project I worked as a Senior Level Designer for League of Geeks on Jumplight Odyssey through ideation and pre-production, all the way through to Early Access release and EA support.
This included early user-research, and creating an ideation build exploring the starship systems such as build mode, construction, and interactions between buildables and rooms on the ship.
MY ROLE
As a Senior Level Designer on a project with non-traditional level design work, I applied my experience toward gameplay systems that focused on spatial design problems (build mode, construction, buildable interactions and guidelines, validation systems, tech trees, etc). Although I also branched out into AI behaviours, content design, economy balancing, and user research. As a result, my role often looked like a hybrid level/gameplay system designer on this project.
Greyboxing of decks and deck navigation for the first ship of JLO
All content in the game was initially greyboxed with defined repair and interaction points to gain insight into the spatial constraints of each ship and balance the challenge of space management
Ruleset for the build mode construction tools
Defining tech unlock content
Early Mockup of the Buildmode System which worked via a visualisation then confirm approach. The visualisation was intended to represent the future state of the intended construction, while also being able to show the current layout beneath it as Build Mode runs in real time.
Build Mode in its final form.
DAY-TO-DAY TASKS
My day-to-day tasks on this project involved running ahead on design features and documentation, responding to user-research and feedback later in the project, guiding the team, holding feature kickoffs and supporting those working on features I designed throughout development with feedback and implementation. I also handled content such as AI behaviours, balancing, and buildable implementation as part of our content pipepline.
Defining fonts as a styleguide for a UI artist
Communicating with engineers as to how build mode validation should work to prevent players from building problematic layouts
OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS
I also worked with the publishing team on marketing materials, Steam assets, and designed the Jumplight Odyssey logo. For more information on my graphic design contributions to this project, see Jumplight Odyssey in the graphic design section of my portfolio.
