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Nightmare
[Engine: Source, Half-Life2] [Team Size: 14 people]
Description | Roles | My Contributions | Downloads | Screenshots | Videos
The protagonist of Nightmare is Aaron Tarbutton, a young boy who uses his big imagination to direct Bernie and CiCi through many crazy adventures around the neighborhood.
The young children and their dream creatures are the hook of Nightmare. Their creativity not only inspires their sense of style, they’ve also devised an ability to attack frightening foes with unparalleled dream creatures. Each giant, ethereal creature belongs to a single child. When summoned, it flows out of the child’s mind in a brilliant wave of power and might.
Aaron advances through the game’s various stages fighting Fear Critters, Mids, and Boss Monsters. Through combat, he achieves new combo skills, rescues his friends, and collects special items. Only by rescuing all his friends from their fears and defeating the King of Monsters can Aaron escape the nightmare.
Role(s): Game Designer and Level Designer
My Contributions:
- Ensuring the vision of the game remains consistent; proactively discussing design and evaluating limitations with team leads
- Designing and documenting key game systems: characters, combat, pickups, and user interface
- Secured an industry advisor for design guidance and a composer for custom music and sound
- Authored a 140+ page Game Design Document, published and updated on a development wiki
- Scripted and implemented all the custom soundscapes for the game
- Coordinated with audio designer and programmer to implement character and pickup sound effects
- Coordinated and assessed playtest feedback
- Ad-hoc assistance on scripting events and level design
- Designed and constructed the park level.
- Scripted casual mob encounters across all levels.
Downloads:
- Game Design Document, Version 5.0 [pdf]
Nightmare focuses on a real-time party combat model where children unleash their dream creatures or pair their creatures to attack enemies. During battle, the player fights alongside his companions and he frequently summons another party member to attack his target.
Combo attacks deal more damage to help the player win the fight. The player achieves combos by chaining attacks and combining the attacks of different characters. The combat in Nightmare emphasizes fast-paced, responsive action that achieves in both aesthetics (look and sound) and kinesthetics (feel).
My main goals while designing the combo system were that it (a) had to be simple to discover and remember and (b) had to be gratifying. Since Nightmare is a short demo, I wanted players to be able to dive into action sooner and be able to execute awesome attacks earlier. Also, considering that the game would meet a low ESRB rating (E or E10+), I wanted the combo system to be achievable by a general audience.
In Nightmare, the player begins as Aaron and uses Aaron’s Lion dream creature to fight against the various monsters of childhood nightmares.
Pictured here, the player fights against the Dire Walrus, a mini-boss. The Dire Walrus is a corrupted version of Bernie's Dream Creature (a walrus); Bernie's young mind has been manipulated by the King of Monsters, causing Bernie to become the Dire Walrus.
I promoted boss battles in the vision for the project because I see them as a means to break-up the routine of fighting mobs in an action-game. Overall, I want the fun in the game to come from a gratifying tactile feel rather than a series of cerebral challenges. I see combat and player growth-- through leveling and collection-- as primary sources of fun in Nightmare.
To aid our small level design department (two people), I took on the additional responsibility of designing and constructing the level pictured above.
Above, a demonstration of each character's Finishing Move.
Death was a sensitive topic in Nightmare. Since the game revolves around such young protagonists, death and gratuitous gore did not fit the game's theme. Just as we replaced gore with cartoon violence, the concept of death was modified to "being consumed by fear". While the mechanics are unchanged from normal avatar "death", the children cower instead of rag-dolling. A large part of this decision was to keep the game tasteful to our intended audience.