Game Designer
Toll Booth
A Quick Glance
-Genre: Suivaval, Horror
-Engine: Unreal Engine 4
-Environment: PC
-Develop Length: 6 weeks
Summary
Toll Booth is a collab project mainly inspired by Alan Wake. Player will act as a new employee who starts working in a small parking lot during the night shift. Unfortunately, strange things happen. You need to figure out what happens and try to protect the parking lot and your new job. While you are investigating, threats sneak behind you real quick...
Role
Project Lead/3D Artist - Tucker Arnold
Level Design/Scripter - Jiaming Yuan(me)
Technical Artist/Scripter - Chaowei Shi
UI/UX, Producer - Joseph Louis Calata
I was the primary scripter who design most part of the game mechanics and system. I was responsible for:
-Level layout scratch
-Level design/Walkthrough
-Flashlight system
-Cutscenes
-In-game event
-Simple battle system
Experience
This is the first time I actually made a game with others. The result may not be perfect, but I have learned a lot from it.
A lot of problems popped up during the development process. In the beginning, as a designer, I asked my leader for more detail for the game. But he didn't think that much about the gameplay since he is a 3D artist. So the first meeting I asked the team to brainstorm together and set up a game document to keep track.
The most difficult thing might be denying others' requests. Since we are students having multiple classes, we couldn't work full time on the project. But still, teams will come up with some brand new ideas that they want to implement into the project. Sadly, I had to deny basically all of them because our time was not enough for new things. It was a bit hard to communicate and tell them if adding more, we won't be able to finish the project in time.
*Part of Game Design Document
The second problem I found was that the development process was too slow. The level Blockout was finished in week three, while the level layout was still not yet decided. At the moment, it's already half of the time has passed. The final level was finished in week 5, which means only a week to test and debug. So in week three, I stopped anyone from adding anything new and cut out some features that were not important. Fortunately, the action shorten the development time and made it finished in time.
Overall I think Toll Booth is a great prototype project though it's not well finished. I have learned quite a lot about the workflow of development as well as workings with other game developers.
