CLOCKWORK

PREMISE

ClockWork is a 3D Platformer created in the Unreal Tournament 3 engine in the Spring of 2009. The player controls Myra, an aspiring young inventor who finds herself in a steampunk-esque clocktower in desperate need of repair. Armed with a “Repair Beam” she created herself, she seeks to get the old rusty tower back in shape.

The primary goals of ClockWork are to navigate broken gears to find broken pipes, repair them, turn on the repaired clockwork, then navigate the same space as before with the gears moving to reach new areas.

 

MY ROLES

-Lead Designer

I was the Lead Designer on ClockWork. This involved establishing the creative vision, establishing the core mechanics, writing the design documentation, and guiding the team’s creative vision to match the game’s core concepts.

-Level Designer

In addition to the Lead Designer role, I was also the Level Designer. In this role, I created design sketches for the three “stages” in the game, worked with the artists to integrate assets necessary to navigation, assembled the levels with the provided assets, and used QA feedback to modify the levels for playability and flow of difficulty.

My main goal for the level designs was to create interesting enough spaces where the player does not mind navigating them multiple times. The mechanics create a flow where the player must traverse an area three times; once forward, looking for broken objects; once in reverse, to return to the level’s terminal; and forward a second time, with moving pieces. I specifically designed the levels to provide a different experience for each of these three, so that the player always gains new experiences, even when backtracking.

-Lead Engineer

I was the Lead Engineer for ClockWork as well. As Engineer, I worked with UnrealScript to create the Repair Gun and repairable objects in the game, but the bulk of my work was with Kismet in the Unreal Tournament 3 editor. Using Kismet, I created all the level-specific events, animated the environment with Matinee, and created the level flow on the engineering side by creating the criteria for progression.