About Project Dreamscape
Every night when you close your eyes, you enter a mystical world of your own creation. But tonight is different. Your stress, struggles, and strain has all manifested itself into Dreamons - inner fiends that threaten to turn your slumber into a nightmare.
Armed with a mystical shape-shifting hammer and guided by your childhood stuffed animal, you must fight to preserve your dream and confront what lies beneath. Build your dreamscape one land at a time and unlock powerful abilities to face increasingly challenging waves of dreamons. Will you wake up refreshed, or forever trapped in your inner turmoil?
This project was made by Studio Aspen using Unity.
My Roles as Game Designer:
Designing Enemies
Ideation: brainstormed enemies with unique abilities to challenge the player in interesting ways
Focuses: while ideating, I focused on conceptualizing ways enemies can interact with the environment for more engaging and compelling game play
Communicating ideas: I used flow charts to convey to the programmers how the enemies ability should function, and documentation with concept images to convey the narrative and overall idea to other departments
Examples: my favorite enemy that I worked on was the Steam Roller.
The Steam Roller is a floating ball fo steam that spits out puffs of steam to attack the player. Additionally, the Steam Roller has unique interactions with the player and the environmnet. If the player runs through the Steam Roller, they take a small amount of damage. But, if another fire type enemy runs through the steam roller that enemy regains a small amount of health.
Designing Hazards:
Ideation: came up with 7 different concepts of hazards that could lead to unique environmental interactions.
Communicating Ideas: I described the different states a hazard could have (when they are idle, and the different ways they could be interacted with) and what the hazard does in these states.
Revising: I revised ideas created earlier on in the designing process to better fit our vision, and have more unique interactions.
Examples: My favorite hazard that I worked on were the Mushrooms for the Dream Forest Biome. When these mushrooms are stepped on by the player or an enemy, they burst causing the player's vision to be warped for 20s, or the enemy to be stunned for 5s (depending on which steps on it). Alternatively, if the player sees the mushroom in advance, they can hit it with their weapon at range, causing the mushroom to burst without any negative effects.
Balancing:
Playtesting: In the final stages of the development process, I playtested various build stages of our game, and played around in Unity, tweaking values for more coherent gameplay.
Feedback: In addition to reporting bugs, I was assigned specific enemies to play special close attention to, including base enemies, and elite enemies. I then provided feedback on what worked well, what wasn't working well, and ideas on how behavior could be tweaked.
My Role in Narrative Design:
Collaborative Storytelling:
I worked alongside the rest of the Narrative team to create a compelling story that combines the environment, hazards, enemies, and characters into one cohesive picture. The overarching theme of the game is self-discovery, and personal growth.
Biomes:
Project Dreamscape takes place in a surreal dream world that reflects the subconcious mind of the Dreamer. This dream world has three distinct biomes: the Dream Forest, a Fire Land, and a Food Land. The Dream Forest represents creativity, exploration, and is 'the calm before the storm'. The Fire Land represents regret and frustration, and the Food Land represent desire.
The Guide
The Guide was my favorite part of the narrative to work on. The Guide is a comfort stuffed animal from the Dreamer's childhood. It comes to life in the dream world as a wilfully ignorant, happy go-lucky mascot that helps the Dreamer through their dreamscape. However, as the game progresses, the Guide's motives become complicated. The Guide wants to help the Dreamer, however as the Dreamer gains more confidence in themself, they need the Guide less and less, meaning that the Guide would eventually disappear.