Cecelia - Indie (Shipped)

Aifir Interactive

Unreal Engine 5 | Team of 16 | Nov. 2022 - Aug. 2023

I worked as a technical designer on a team of 16 to create a first-person action adventure RPG where the player escorts a giant baby NPC across a mysterious island. I owned narrative and audio design and implementation, designed our systems and 3C’s, and led playtesting and bug fixing efforts.

Top Skills

Visual Scripting, Audio Design, Narrative Design, Level Design, Premiere, Audition, Perforce, Jira, Confluence, Miro, Agile Methodologies

Lessons Learned

The UCF FIEA Capstone project is the defining experience of the program. 70 grad students are drafted into 4 different teams of artists, designers, programmers, and producers. Together, they must produce a game experience. That’s the extent of the constraints.

A handful of projects are shining achievements of student excellence. Ours represents the reality of 16 graduating students needing an example of [Game Dev Skill or Art Style] and “1 shipped title” on their resumes to get into [Dream Games Studio]. The game was designed around ensuring each person got to flex the #1 skill they wanted to show on their resume, in the style of their Dream Studio. And it had to ship on Steam no matter what.

It’s not a very fun or good game. But it clearly has heart, a lot of it is very pretty, and the majority of the team got jobs in the games industry by showing their work from this game, which was our goal for the project.

I learned SO much from this experience by making key mistakes every developer has to but in a controlled, safe setting. I know now that I was not a good Lead Designer back then, but I was humble, honest, and a supportive peer, and always the last one to leave the building before a milestone was due. Thankfully my design leadership skills have been tested many more times since then, with higher consequences, and those experiences have let me prove that I can do this, and do it well.

The lessons I learned, more that the game I showed, is what got me into the AAA industry with my design internship at Ubisoft following this project. Here’s the biggest ones:

  • How to constructively say no to keep a design space pure without shutting down people or ideas

  • Daily Scrums and team building activities are necessary for morale and unity

  • Every game is specifically A Thing for A Person, you need to truly know what you’re making/selling and how the second-to-second gameplay experience will satisfy your consumer

  • Don’t touch the engine until you have a paper design for your game’s systems

  • Don’t scope out a full game before achieving a fun barebones prototype

  • Level metrics and iterative whiteboxing before level art are SO important

  • Document the process of making everything, including time spent to yield results, in order to make better estimates

  • Keep design documentation in a single location (one source of truth) and update it constantly

  • Delete irrelevant JIRA issues, don’t plan for a future that’s not certain

Led Student Design Team

Participated in Sprint Planning with Project Lead, Development Director, Lead Programmer, and Lead Artist.

Led Design Team Scrum meetings 3x a week.

Represented designers’ needs at regular Leads update meetings.

Had 1-1’s with designers to discuss project experience, portfolios, and needs from me.

Directed Mocap Shoots for Character Controllers

Coordinated with designers, animator, technical artist, and programmers to determine and documents needs for player and NPC character animation graphs in Excel.

Attended mocap recording sessions, directing what animations needed to be recorded and how (often physically demonstrating) alongside our Lead Animator, updating documentation upon completion.

Wrote Narrative and Voiceover Script, Cast Actors

I attended an open casting call with our Project Lead for UCF actors with all of the capstone teams, auditioning each of them over Teams.

The plans for our game’s narrative varied drastically as we continually cut scope and Frankensteined together the pieces of a game we had. At the last moment, I wrote a new game narrative and script that I proposed to the team, which utilized our actor’s strengths.

They were impressed with how the whole thing was woven together. If players ignored the absence of systemic gameplay, they could be delighted by a story with a beginning, middle, and end that fit our game’s setting and mechanics.

Worked Where Needed as General Technical Designer, Constantly Playtesting and Bugfixing

My unofficial role on the project was the final Technical Design line of defense, someone to slot in and do what no one else wanted/had bandwidth to do. This meant a lot of late nights before milestone presentations. In addition to the work detailed above, I:

  • Playtested Bird and Spider NPC combat, giving feedback to NPC programmers

  • Playtested and updated floor collisions for all game levels to allow player and companion NPC to fully navigate them, giving feedback to Level Designers and cementing level metrics to decrease navigation bugs

  • Created playtesting “gym” level for our game mechanics

  • Created playtest questions for internal and external playtesters

Sourced and Implemented Most Audio in Game, Created Dialogue Event Tool

Sourced audio from our V.O. recording sessions, freesound.org or other free sources provided by FIEA, often editing files to fit our specific needs in Adobe Audition.

Implemented audio where it made sense to: audio volumes for environment ambience, sound emitters in Blueprints for environment interactions, animation notifies for footsteps, 2D sounds for V.O.

For in-game dialogue, I created a Blueprint class that was physically placed in the game world as a trigger. When it was triggered, it played the V.O., and if subtitles were enabled, it played subtitles. This allowed us to completely control the narrative pacing of the game.

The only sounds I didn’t implement were player exertion (jumping, mantling) and bird NPCs.

Created Cinematics

I created this bird cinematic for our game’s trailer by setting up the scene in Unreal, using a UE Cinematic camera to capture multiple shots, and creating the blinking eye effect/editing the video in Adobe Premiere Pro.

I also created the opening “cinematic” of our game, a voiceover conversation between a mother and daughter set on a rowboat, using Adobe Audition and Premiere Pro.