Project RIAS

Lead Designer, Level Designer, Narrative Designer

Engine: Unity
Platform: PC
Genre: 3rd person puzzle platformer
Time: September 2014 - February 2015
Team: RIAS (10 members)

In Project RIAS, the player plays as Dr. Alexis Peters, a scientist conducting tests with an alien virus. Using different strains of the virus, she is bestowed with extraordinary strength, speed or jumping ability. During a breakdown in security, she is locked within the test chambers herself, and she must try to escape the facility.

At the biannual in-house IGAD awards, Project RIAS received the awards for Best Game and Best Art.

This was the first video game on which I've worked in my life. Details on my role can be found below.

My Contribution

Design Management
At the start of the project I elected to be Lead Designer. It was risky, as it was not only the first time managing a part of the team, but also working in a team to create a video game. Over the course of half a year, I managed the design team and working closely with the leads of the other departments so that together we could keep to a clear vision of the game. All level designers had different methods for designing their levels, so it was important to keep to certain standards. The art team creating modular art assets and a clearly defined narrative vision made it easier to keep up these standards.

Concept Design
I assisted in creating the concept for the game, drawing out possible plans on the whiteboard and asking the team for their input. We did this in several iterations, eliminating ideas and adding constraints to the overall design each time. I composed the first draft of the game design document as a result of this meeting. I proceeded to regularly update the game design document as the mechanics were tweaked and refined and more details were added.

Level Design
In addition to managing the level designers, I designed levels myself as well. I created a large number of them in concept, trying various methods to prototype them (physical drawing, digital drawing, using building blocks, etc.). Only a few of these ended up in the game. The majority of my final levels were meant to introduce the mechanics, with a few testing the player's skills. I outlined in which order the levels should appear, hoping that we would get a good difficulty curve.

After the levels were prototyped, we made them with the modular assets in Unity. This allowed the designers to do the art pass of the levels, with the artists spending the remaining time creating a few assets that would make some levels stand out. This pipeline was very unoptimized however, meaning that larger levels suffered from performance issues.

Narrative Design
At the start we wanted to have at least a basic story that would help define the game's vision. With the artists, I worked out the ideas for the main character and the aesthetics of the setting. As the project progressed better than anticipated, I worked out the details of a story and worked with the rest of the team to add new things that would help deliver this story. I recruited several voice actors to voice the main character, a robot that could be interacted with for helpful dialogue, and the main character's supervisor (whose voice was found on recordings the player could find and collect to reveal bits of backstory).

Example of one of my level designs
​(numbers show height differences)