Hitchhiker
- Job Role: Game Designer
- Released in 2022
- Made in Unity
- Developed by Mad About Pandas
- Published by Versus Evil
Work Breakdown
The production of Hitchhiker started at the same time as I joined Mad About Pandas as a Game Design Intern, which ended up becoming my first full-time game design position in the games industry. While the narrative was already pretty much set in stone, I helped the Creative Director to envision the themes of the story through gameplay design and was in charge of maintaining and creating the game design wiki.
In the second half of the production, I was responsible for putting all of the narrative into a dialogue and event graph, using FlowCanvas inside the Unity engine. Keeping track of the pacing, triggering actions at the correct time, as well as keeping an overall focus on how each ride came together became my main areas of responsibility.
The Work
- Creating and maintaining a game design wiki
- Puzzle design, from conception to overseeing implementation in Unity
- Creating several pitch documents as well as copywriting
- Creating, populating, and maintaining narrative and event graphs in Unity
- Bug fixes and design iteration according to QA and playtest feedback
What I learned
As this was my very first commercial project after finishing my bachelor’s degree, the amount of learnings I had during the production would be too much to list here. I learned so much about how to set up dynamic game design documentation, working in Git branches, and working directly in the Unity engine. I ended up spending most of my work days in Unity, working in graphs to add the dialogue sequences, tweak pacing between voicelines, or trigger puzzle sequences. While at first the work in graphs seemed daunting and I had to research a lot on how to trigger certain things like events, I managed to master the process throughout production.
The quick back and forth between changing the setup or tuning the pacing, then checking the result directly in the game project, was a very rewarding loop, and I really enjoyed the process of learning how to work in graphs and blueprints. This was also my very first step into visual scripting.
Media
