ALIEN INTERN VR
ROLE
Level and Gameplay Designer
DESCRIPTION
Alien Intern VR is a collection of minigames where your sole goal is to stay employed at your internship in the alien space future so that you may kick out your annoying roomie; Greg. Interact with fun modular work activities, gaze upon the stylized environments and characters and leisure in the beautiful fully-voice acted sequences and events!
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
My responsibility for this project was to design the two environments (Home area & Work Area), build the world with a narrative, design and balance the minigames and their sequence and more things. My aim was to make the gameplay feel intuitive and fun and in a nutshell, have unique, challenging, and engaging puzzles that fit within the game's comical theme and interactive mechanics. I had to carefully balance difficulty, provide clarity, and continuously playtest and iterate to create a satisfying and fun experience for players.
BREAKDOWN
Layout and Structure
There are two environments, Home area & Work Area. The home area acted as hub, where the general vibe of the area is to be a calm relaxing space except with occasional bursts of narrative-driven chaos that the player will experience based on which day the player was on (Total of 3 days).
Flow of Gameplay
One of the key parts of the game is that the player can play this game without having to move their legs and can even play while sitting down. This also made designing gameplay slightly difficult. The game used a day by the timeline and in the final build we had 3 days. The 3 days start with the player at the home area and then when the player goes to work, they are to complete a sequence of minigames and if successful they went to the next day. One of my responsibilities was to build these levels with each day having different collection of minigames. I was tasked with taking unique minigames and then sequencing them to be quick and gets the player to be decisive but also not make it impossible to solve. As the days progressed, the general difficulty of the game increases, so puzzles/minigames got more intense as the player increased level.
Visual Progression
Just like the gameplay, environment also progresses as part of the story becoming dirtier and more chaotic. So I had to plan out how the game look changed over time. The character Greg is supposed to be a source of issues for the player but also acts as the goal, where they need to complete the internship to get rid of the Greg. Greg makes the home area progressively worse with dirt and trash all over the place. I designed the look of the different days with which I tried to convey a story with.
Trailer
The final week I found out I had to make a trailer for the game. So I took an approach of the trailer showing some comedy and also showing the gameplay and feel of the game. I got help from the sound students where they composed their own music and fellow teammates to help me with the recording of footage to use.
Other little things
Other than the aforementioned I was also tasked with recording and implementing certain voice lines, writing a narrative, a lot (I MEAN A LOT) of testing and balancing. To have a more clear view of what I did every day, read my developer diary on Alien Intern VR.
