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2018 Winner: 3rd for Best Gameplay
Level designer | audio designer | Sandbox, Adventure | Unreal Engine 4
Game Summary
"Up in the Air" is a third-person sandbox game developed by Studio Jiggly, a group of 13 student developers from Cohort 26 at SMU Guildhall.
Players play as a balloon dog exploring a wacky theme park where they acquire fun balloon-themed powerups (static, inflate, air blast, water balloons, and ground pound) to complete mini-games, collect tokens, win tickets, and avoid cartoonishly frightening children in the silly open world setting of Weenie World.
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There are three different sections to the park: Carnival, Western, and Medieval. Each section has a challenge arena, unique children enemies, shops, and plenty of "gameplay bites" and items to interact with.
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Pure Comedy
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Exaggerated Balloon Physics
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Open Gameplay
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Cartoon Hijinks
Game Pillars and Trailer
Carnival Section
Western Section
Medieval Section
DEVELOPMENT
GAME: Up in the Air
ENGINE: Unreal Engine 4
GENRE: Sandbox, Adventure, Silly
SETTING: Theme Park
DEVELOPMENT TIME:​ 6 months​
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RESPONSIBILITIES
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Level Design, including map design, placement of assets and gameplay, and aesthetic passes
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Developing Gameplay Bites and Flow
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Environmental Design
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Filling World with Variety and Embellishments
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Managing, Finding, Editing, and Balancing Audio
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Wwise-to-Unreal Integration of Audio
DOWNLOADS
Game Design Document
Download on Steam
LEVEL
DESIGN
MAP LAYOUT AND DESIGN
The open-world nature of our game directed the overall design and layout of our game. Because our game is set in a theme park, the level designers laid out each area with pathways to lead the player to other areas to towards the varying mini-games we placed throughout the park. The whole level design team (4 designers) had joint responsibility over the layout, placement of gameplay elements, and implementation of art and programming assets.
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My responsibilities for level design in particular were set initially on map design and eventually tuned heavily towards implementation of assets, gameplay elements, and aesthetic quality checks, where needed.
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Apart from general level design duties, I also acted as the sole member of the audio department for our team. My responsibilities as "the audio person" were planning, searching for, editing, balancing, and integrating all of the audio for the game.
Left: Carnival (top) and Western (bottom) top-down maps.
Right: Medieval top-down map.
Because the level designers worked in tandem and switched off often between areas, the overall layout and design of the park are really a combination of the 4 level designers efforts.
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The biggest challenge in such a collaboration across all three sections was keeping consistency across the different areas. Each area had its own unique theme, but in the end, each area needed to feel like it belonged to the same setting AKA "tacky theme park." Ways I personally contributed to cohesion of our design were implementing mini-games in different ways, filling out the world with familiar gameplay and assets (such as the carnival tents or benches), and working with artists to make aesthetics passes for overall cohesion.
MINI-GAME CONCEPTING
While I did not ultimately end up taking a heavy role in developing the final mini-games, I did make some initial impact. This particular mini-game I made during pre-production of our game was a combination of physics, timing, kitbashing, and reward, a combo seen in multiple mini-games in our final build.
VISUAL COHESION
A big part of my level design role was communicating with the artists on the aesthetic quality of our layouts and making sure updated assets were used in our iterations of the map.
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A couple of challenges in keeping visual cohesion with our map ensuring that the correct updated assets were used throughout the map and making sure others weren't working on certain levels so as not to overwrite each others' work. To combat those challenges, I made sure to keep in constant communication with both the environmental artist point person and my level design team to ensure that each side understood what was changing and for what reason. My role in this was also helpful because as I made aesthetic passes, I also kept in mind how those changes would alter gameplay and adjusted accordingly.
AUDIO
GOING SOLO, BUT NOT REALLY
A major role I filled on "Up in the Air" was as the sole audio designer. I had prior experience working on audio from my class's previous team game and ended up leading the charge with audio. Because we had a smaller team and we were working with an open-world setting, level design played a big part of our game, and because we wanted a highly-polished product with ample player feedback, sound was also a big part of our game.
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There were a number of challenges I faced in this role: planning, organization, setting schedules for cut-off dates, flexibility, and communication. The biggest balm to these potential issues was constant and proactive communication with the game designer, the level design team, and the programmers. The pipeline I established for myself was to speak with the game designer first to get an idea of what sounds were needed and the schedule for completion, then talk with the designers to generate a list of specific sounds required, and in between searching for and editing sounds, I spoke with programmers to check on the technical requirements on their end and to give updated lists of which sounds were ready for them to integrate within Unreal.
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Something that I kept in mind was that while I was the only audio designer, I was not the only say in what audio went into the game. I made sure to get regular feedback on the sounds for relatedness and balance and stayed flexible so as to not shirk my level design duties.
PLAYING NICE
Area Music Transition
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As stated previously, I worked with other disciplines to achieve the audio quality that our game demanded. That meant working with programmers to properly integrate sounds into the game. One task in particular involved working directly with one programmer to place specific area sounds and set up the audio transitions for when players moved between areas.
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A challenge we faced was communication. Expectations were not conveyed properly and there were short moments of frustration between us as we tried to tackle the issues as designer versus programmer. The conflict, which wasn't so much a conflict as it was confusion, was very short-lived as we took some time to sit down and discuss what each of us were trying to accomplish based on what we understood. We were able to move quickly past our issue and integrate area music and sound transitions from both the programming and designer ends.
QUANTITY AND QUALITY
Audio Examples
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Player feedback via audio was an important part of our game, which meant I needed to accommodate for a wide range of sounds. Different sound types I had to find, edit, and balance included but are not limited to player movement sounds, player powerup sounds (acquiring and using), various item and instance sounds, and sounds associated with specific props and gameplay bites.
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Part of alleviating the challenge of the sheer amount of sounds I needed to find was extensive planning and organization. I compiled a list of all the sounds and marked off when they were found, edited, implemented, and fully integrated. This helped me keep track of and prioritize the audio files that went into the game and made it easier for me as well as other members of the team when they tested player feedback and satisfaction in completing tasks in-game.
UTILIZING WWISE
Child Laugh - //
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Child Laugh Altered (Chunkles) - //
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I used Wwise to integrate audio easily into Unreal Engine, but another useful aspect of it is its editing features. Utilizing Wwise's editing features was an easy way to alter sounds for the purposes of our game. This acted as a useful and creative way to counteract some of the potential issues that came from having a large list of sounds to find and edit because this allowed me to play around with the different values of the sounds and iterate quickly on them.
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An example of this playful iteration that ended up making it into the final game was the laughter of the children in the game. We had a unique child character named Chunkles who was to represent the most horrific version of our already cartoonishly terrifying children and I wanted the sounds associated with him to reflect that. I pitched down the same laughter in Wwise and it worked out perfectly for how we wanted to convey him.
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Flexibility and Versatility
Because I held major roles in level design and audio design, I had to remain flexible to complete a variety of tasks based on level needs. A challenge with juggling the two was working with two separate schedules for level design and audio deliverables and determining which one needed more attention. I was able to generally stay on top of my tasks despite the added responsibility of being the whole audio department for our game and my flexibility and versatility in addressing my tasks contributed to our team's success.
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Cross-Discipline Communication and Seeking Understanding
My unique position as both an aesthetics-leaning level designer and the audio designer meant I had to be very proactive about communication between all the different disciplines. There were multiple parts within the game that I worked on that required more than one discipline for completion and not just I but the majority of my team was very open about speaking across disciplines and trying to understand each other. This helped the members of the team feel more personal ownership over the game as well as expedited our progress so that we were always on top of our milestones.
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Self-Sufficiency
Because I was the only audio designer on the team, I had to be more self-sufficient when it came to planning, organization, and task completion. I created my own schedule for completing buckets of tasks (based on the overall milestone schedule for the team) and developed a pipeline for myself that kept the related parties involved in the audio development process. Throughout the project, I kept mind of the team effort and made sure not to isolate myself to my tasks to ensure that I was putting out the best sounds for our game.
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Team Culture
As part of the original pitch team for our game, I had a heavy hand in establishing the initial culture for our team. Along with some key outspoken members of the squad, we as a team were able to foster a good, psychologically safe culture for our studio. One of the biggest successes throughout the development of our game was how our team interacted with each other and handled conflict. We felt comfortable enough with each other to call each other out and have discussions for the purposes of clarity and redirection for the good of our game. This resulted in a solid foundation on which we made "Up in the Air" and an overall smoother process for developing our game.
LESSONS LEARNED
THE GOOD
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Unexpected Workload Increase Due to Disorganization
As a team, we were not the most organized when it came to certain pipelines and processes. The most personal frustration I felt from this was through how there were requests for piles of audio after I had already planned out an appropriate amount of time to dedicate to my audio tasks. Though I addressed the team with scheduled cut-off dates for audio and expressed frustrations during post-milestone retrospectives, these issues still popped up every so often. Though the excess audio wasn't enough to truly set me back, it was still frustrating to be piled on with more work when I also had other pre-planned tasks to complete. As a reaction to this, I tried my best to stay flexible and speak out more about where I was in terms of audio progress. This alleviated the issue somewhat, but I definitely learned that in the future should I be put in a similar situation, I should speak out more and pointedly remind others of what is available in terms of time resources and scheduled lock dates.
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Trouble Speaking Up and Listening
Though I definitely had issues with this at times (see above), I saw that a common issue especially between artists and level designers was trouble speaking up and trouble listening in response. There were many times when I would hear a team member ask a question or mention something and either no one would respond or no one would appropriate address it. On more than one occasion, these sorts of information relaying resulted in oversight on parts of our game that should have been addressed before that point. Though I tried to play my own part in speaking up and listening, I became part of the problem when I didn't try to follow up on or point out when others were trying or failing to do the same. What I learned was that it's not enough that I just take care of myself, I have to look out for other members of my team, especially if I notice that something like miscommunication is happening.
Post-Mortem
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