3D Game Design

Dream Eaters

Dream Eaters is a horde style, co-op game. Protect your comrades from the nightmares writhing in their wake. How long can you escape?

This game was developed by a team of students from U of T and OCADU. For this project I worked as a team lead, 2D artist, concept artist, webmaster and 3D asset modeler. I worked in Paint Tool Sai, Maya and Unity.

Play the Game

Start

During a class at OCADU, I had the privilege of having my initial game pitch developed with a team of students, that I recruited, over the span of a semester.

My pitched concept was, "A non stop running game where you and 3 people of various classes traverse a dream maze while being chased by dream eaters. Players have to kill the other players dream eaters to keep them at bay. This is wave style game that gets progressively harder and has dream eaters morph into more powerful entities if not destroyed fast enough. Players cannot cross paths nor run into each other or else there will be consequences."

Essentially, it was a form of co-op snake.

Design

In order to make sure every facet of the team was on the same page, I started a design bible and made sure to list out the core principals of our game. This design bible was updated constantly and used to propose / record game and design changes by everyone. There was also a separate document for timelines, deadlines and tasks for each teammate. Organization, feedback and clarity were major points of focus for me as team lead.

Players constantly move forwards and can turn.
Stationary enemies spawn in players path, creating a trail.
Shoot an ally's dream eaters to shrink their trail or any enemies
Colour signifies which player can damage which enemies.
Rewards and items will spawn to help players.
Obstacles will be added to the map.
Running into a trail or other enemy kills player.
All players respawn every round
The goal is to survive as long as possible in the increasingly difficult levels.
All assets are designed for a top down and distant POV.

Enemies

The design and complexity of the game changed throughout the various stages of development due to the extremely tight deadlines. Mainly, the enemies altered their purpose greatly.

Initially I had proposed the Calamity ( the large enemy that stands over the stage ) to have a much bigger and direct presence. At major milestones of progress, the Calamity was meant to act as a boss level and appear in the center of the stage. They would slam tendrils into the ground and spawn enemies. Calamities were originally pitched as the only way to revive players. However, that was scrapped due to the fact that idle players would lose interest.

The scourge was originally much more of a boss instead of what I called stray enemies. These would spawn from trails that got too long. This is where the enemy colour mechanic came in and remained.

Complications

After meeting and presenting to multiple game companies from indie to a triple A creator like Ubisoft and various playtesters, our team was able to take their advise and overcome many design challenges.

The main issues we encountered were...

Time restraints
Control bindings for a shared keyboard
Conveying the cooperative nature of the game to players
Compatibility between different programs, specifically Parsec for playing and Maya assets to Unity.

In terms of basic design, the only major change was the type of movement. Players originally had a full range of motion but, that was switched out with set vertical and horizontal angles. This felt much better to play with and much more fluid. This also made hitboxes feel much more accurate and allowed us to implement a constant direction for controls.

Often times, people found themselves killing their teammate despite their necessary role in continuing the game. After all, you cannot destroy your own trail of enemies which means you will eventually run into it and lose. I even found myself chasing my friends while testing the game and playing my own way. While this is perfectly fine, an issue arose from a design standpoint because the players thought they were supposed to be verses each other.

A main design and mechanic in Dream Eaters was colour. We initially grappled with whether or not only units of the same colour should be able to affect each other or the ladder. Regardless, we wanted colour to be major mechanic for visual design, gameplay interest and to push the co-op nature of the game. After researching both options, we found that having players that are the same colour as an enemy not be able to kill them fit with the design of players and trails being the same colour and improved teamwork.

Colour was actually a double edged sword because having various players be various colours removed harmony in team design. As mentioned before, I often encouraged players and my teammates to design the game to be playable in a vindictive or cooperative manner, obviously the ladder being easier for everyone. This design choice sort of found a middle ground for that principle.

The main solution came from a designer at Ubisoft that taught us about the psychology of designing a team. It was as simple as moving the players to start near each other instead of in opposite corners of the map. After adjusting spacing and giving a zone of invincibility so players don't instantly die, the problem was resolved.

Extra Work