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DUCKSIDE OF THE MOON | 2022

full cycle

16 weeks

23 devs

Game Design

Narrative Design

Level Design

Responsibilities

  • Shaped the core design and led the design team

  • Designed and blocked out the player base

  • Established the narrative, characters, dialogue, etc.

  • Designed and implemented the onboarding mission

  • Led playtest sessions and analyzed relevant data

Unreal Engine 4

Blueprints

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Released on Itch.io

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PROJECT OVERVIEW

Game summary

Duckside of the Moon is a survival game about Doug, a talented duck astronaut, who gets sent up into space for a research expedition. On his journey, he gets sucked into a wormhole, and he is transported to a mysterious galaxy. His ship has reset, and he's stuck.

 

This brave duck must find resources to improve his gear and fix his spaceship, so that he can return home to his friends and family. While doing this, he must overcome dangerous environments as he realizes that he might not be the only one up here...

 

Game details

  • Genre

  • Player support

  • Platforms

  • Release date

Survival

Single player

Itch.io

June 28, 2022

GAME OVERVIEW

Research and planning

During the concept phase, I was tasked to plan a spaceship for our third-person duck character. The player base was set to be the players introduction to the game, a safe space, and a reflection of the player's progression through unlockable spaceship upgrades.

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Responsibilities

  • Researched the relationship between base upgrades and gameplay 

  • Researched hub world level design

  • Established design rules and constraints for the base and it's ingredients

  • Established paper designs of the base ingredients

  • Sketched out variants of scalable top-down lay-outs

  • Collected reference images to establish a fitting block-out shape language

One of the earlier sketch iterations for the base

The level ingredients in the base were planned out specifically so that the player follows a natural pathing without backtracking

The summary of my hub world design research

LEVEL DESIGN 

Block-outs, modular kits, and level design ingredients

Once we had everything planned out, we moved onto the pre-production phase. For me, this meant creating the block-out in engine following the rules I had set for myself. I created a modular kit for the base and documented the pieces with their exact metrics. This way, artists could replace the pieces with the desired model. 

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Responsibilities​

  • Blocked out the base

  • Created a modular kit for the base

  • Created a modular kit document with metrics for artist usage

  • Conducted playtests and analyzed the results 

  • Implemented level design ingredients with Blueprints

    • moving doors, upgrades, air pockets, etc.