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Dino Maze

INTRODUCTION

Dino Maze is a game developed for the Digital Bros Academy Online Blended.

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We developed the game on Unreal Engine 4 in five months.

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Created with other six members from the academy. The goal was to create a speedrunner game involving meteors and dinosaurs.

PROJECT DETAILS

  • Developed in 5 months

  • Unreal Engine 4

  • Level design

  • Gameplay designer

  • Lead project manager

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01 - The game

Dino Maze is an action platformer speedrunning game, where the player takes control of a Velociraptor trying to find a shelter before a final meteor collides on earth.

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The core concept was to convey an experience of stress and fast paced escape from a cataclysmic event! The player needs to find the exit from the level while taking refuge in the various shelters scattered around the level to protect himself from small meteor fragments.  The player wins if he finds the exit before the final meteor arrives.

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The game is all about speed and platforming skill, it's also asked to try to find the most convenient route, as the level design was created to offer more approaches to the traversal of the level.

Miro - ideation sessions.

02 -My role - Lead Project Manager & Level Designer

During the development I took the role of Lead Project Manager, Gameplay Designer, Level Designer and Animator.

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With my team, we started in pre-production with a radically different idea (the game was set to be a puzzle game!), but after the feedback's ad many iterations, we switched to a more action platforming game, to convey a more frenetic gameplay.

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As a Lead Project I had the responsibility to organise the ideation sessions, convergence sessions, daily meetings, daily standups, and the creation of weekly reports.

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Also, i needed to take the role of a Leader, and for me, this role means that I had to communicate constantly with my team to ensure a direction and resolving daily issues and questions from the team.

Weekly Report of the team.

03 - Defining the game's structure

As a Designer, I had the tasks to create the skeleton of the game and to create the experience. 

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I gathered a lot of experience from the last projects, this leads me to be more reflective on my design actions and asking constantly questions to myself:

  • is this necessary to the experience?

  • Does this element of the loop interact well with other parts?

  • Do we need to change this part to be more useful in the gameplay?

  • Is this element understandable by the player?

  • Does this part satisfy the experience thai i want to convey to the player?

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With many iterations and the help of my design team we made a lot of changes that we believe confidently that changed the game for the better.

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Tasks completed related to design:

  • Created the pitch and GDD with my colleagues.

  • Resolving quickly daily issues of design, talking also daily with the programmer team.

Some GDD pages.

Pitch Document

04 - Level Design

I had the pleasure to take again the role as a level designer.

This time the task was to create a level with multiple routes, while also trying to always navigate indirectly the player to the right direction to take.

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I had in these months collected experience in level creation in Unreal Engine 4, these are the thing that I learnt:​

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  • Level Blueprint management.

  • Cut scenes and use of Level Sequences.

  • Landscape manipulation, LOD settings and creation of materials.

  • I learnt about post processing effects, I created for this game a Cel-Shading effect to give a more cartoonish world.

  • Use of specific props to help navigate the player to the right direction.

05 - Blender and Animation

Blender was a challenge to learn, because I had zero experience, but I wanted to create animation for our protagonist. So, I gathered as many resources as I can to learn modeling and animation.

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After many attempts, I had a fully functional model with a skeleton ready to model! 

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I have created 22 animations for the Velociraptor.

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Tasks done as an Animator:

  • Created the Velociraptor model.

  • Created the Control Rig of the Velociraptor.

  • Did the weight painting and texturing.

  • created Animations.

Team

Game Design:

Francesco Pradelli

Luca Santini

Niccolò Giannunzio

Programmer

Riccardo Angeli

Amos Illi Grignani

Fabrizio Ferorelli

Enrico Lin

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