Kimball Brooksby - Game Designer

Summary

For this System Shock-inspired survival horror game, I handled the bulk of the system and UI design in both documentation and implementation. The biggest design challenge for this project was figuring out how to create a compelling and legible game with the pixelated graphics and low-light environment we wanted to use. To work toward this goal, I designed and implemented a minimalistic UI, a postprocess effect to highlight nearby items, and a dynamic audio system, so that the player would have enough visual and audio cues to read the game world without all the visual quality the player might be used to.

Details

Team Size | 7

Duration | 3 Months

Platform | Windows (Itch.io)

Role | Technical Designer

Tools | UE 5, Blueprints, Trello, Nuclino, Perforce

Enemy Behavior Design

The Problem: Where Do I Go?

For Compound we wanted to use the enemies to solve two problem: First, "How do we make the environment feel dangerous?", and second, "How do we guide the player to progress through the level?"

The Process: Breaking Down the Problem

To answer these, we split the problem into two enemy types that we could use to solve them. For the first question, we needed an enemy that we could reuse to create areas of varying danger, while for the second, we needed one that the player could use as a landmark to navigate the map.

The Solution: Divide & Conquer

The two enemies I worked on were the Shambler and the Wanderer. The first one shambles around within given radius and is weak while alone, but can be used in groups to create scaling barriers. The second one is really strong and patrols between specific points, giving the map a specific flow.

CompoundShamblerShowcase.mp4

Diagram Comparison: Shambler Behavior (Top) vs. Wanderer Behavior (Bottom)

Inventory & Interaction System

The Problem: What Can I Do?

In order to foster the atmosphere we wanted, the game needed a core mechanic that would consistently provide the player with meaningful decisions and be the main source of dramatic tension.

The Process: Testing & Iterating

To start, we wanted to work with the idea of combining items. In testing though, being able to combine every item with every other item proved to large for our scope and limiting combination to just a base item and a modifying item didn't give the player any interesting decision points.

The Solution: Give the Player a Backpack & Some Glue

In the end, I implemented a system that allows the player to combine duplicate items into a single, stronger version, which works with the inventory's limited space to create dramatic tension by letting the player choose between multiple uses or higher potency of items.

CompoundCompoundingShowcase.mp4

User Interface Design

The Problem: What Can I Do? (Right Now)

The main challenge we ran into with the UI was figuring out how to provide the player with all the necessary information they would need to interact with the world without taking away from the visual presentation of game.

The Process: Compiling, Sketching, & Minimizing

To do this, we started with a list of all the information the player would need, such as health, ammo, and inventory items, and created a UI sketch for each of them. Then, we took that mock up and progressively reduced the size and complexity of the elements until we had something that we were happy with.

The Solution: Only Show What the Player Needs

This left us with a one-bar inventory that displayed everything the player needed for the inventory and interaction system, an ammo counter of six dots around the reticle that would only appear while the gun was held, and a blood vignette that would increase in intensity as the player took damage.

Video Comparison: Ammo Count (Top Left),
Inventory Old (Bottom Left), New (Bottom Right)

CompoundAmmoCountShowcase.mp4

InventoryShowcase_1.mp4

InventoryShowcase_4.mp4

Postprocessing & Particle VFX

The Problem: Why Is Everything Low Resolution?

My team didn't have any dedicated 2D artists, so we needed to find a way to create a coherent, interesting, and legible visual style without relying on creating our own textures from scratch.

The Process: Researching & Photographing

We started by doing some research on how other games may have gotten around this problem, which pointed us in the direction of a few old PlayStation games that used pixelated photos as textures. Along the way, we found that pickups were hard to see and needed fix that as well.

The Solution: Use a Filter (Deliberately)

We ended up combining two methods, photographic textures and post-process pixelization, to get the consistent visual fidelity and unifying style we were looking for, and putting a proximity outline effect on items in the environment to make them more visible.

Video Comparison: Without Post-Processing (Left), With Post-Process (Right)

CompoundSansVFXShowcase.mp4

CompoundVFXShowcase.mp4

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