Enzo
Platform: PC
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Team Size: 5
Duration: 20 weeks
During the last year of my game design program, I worked with a team of five on my capstone project to create Enzo. For the first few weeks of the project, I primary worked as a Game Designer and UI Designer, designing puzzles and UI elements, and experimenting with linguistics and contextual themes. Throughout the creation process, I gathered important player testing feedback to report back to our team on how to improve the puzzle design, pace of the game, and legibility. I documented our design processes and created the gameplay trailer to showcase our game.
GAME OVERVIEW
Enzo is a single player 1st person puzzle and exploration game in which you play an alien dog set on a foreign planet. Found in a strange environment with no understanding of what’s going on, you must explore the world around you and try to please the intelligent owner you live with by performing various tasks and not getting into too much trouble.
IN-GAME SCREENSHOTS
GAME DESIGN
MECHANICS
Since exploration is a key theme of Enzo, platforming and climbing onto all sorts of objects is a main focus. As you explore the environment that you're unfamiliar with, we did not want to limit the imagination of players. Even though everything can be climbed on, not everything should be, which makes the player think about how they want to best achieve their goals without failing their goals.
Game play is mostly defined by puzzles and completing tasks to unlock new areas. Various objectives are given to the player but very little direct guidance is given. They are given just enough direction and game feedback to understand what is good and bad, but the rest is up for interpretation. Lots of objects in the game are familiar enough to seemingly understand their function, but there are twists.
Every object is interactable in some way even if it isn't related to the main objectives. The world has many interactables and puzzles for the player to discover; some are used to progress while others are more hidden and fun. Most objects have instant feedback to give the players incentive to explore more than just the follow the main objectives and encourage exploration.
UI DESIGN
The feedback in our game is mostly told through three elements: the NPCs desires, how much time the player has to do them, and how well the player is doing. The last two elements crossed over many times, and through rigorous testing was decided that combining time and progress was the best way to accomplish our goals.
If the player did actions that were unsatisfactory, the timer would go down, making the objective harder to complete within the time given for each task. However, completing these tasks made the time extend so the tasks made be completed.
Objectives were told through pop ups from the NPC in the form of visuals. The NPC also had tonal visible and audio cues that the player was doing good or bad, allowing the player to understand how to progress without the need for understandable language.