FISH!

Third Person Action Roguelike January 2024-May 2024

Level Designer / Encounter Designer Team Size: 8

Responsibilities: Game Concepting, Level Design, Encounter Design, System Design/implementation, Documentation

Game Overview

YOU ARE IN DEBT! Play as Gobey, an anthropomorphic catfish who’s lost all his shells in a game of go-fish. The holder of your debt, a raccoon named Meatball, now expects you to pay it back ASAP. Travel from island to island, knocking out other bottom-feeders for their shells by smacking them with your handy fishing rod up close, or by yanking them around from afar. Then choose whether to risk your shells on gambling for upgrades, as you chip away at your debt and hook, line, and sink your enemies into the surrounding swampy waters! You can also seek out 23 achievements in your quest to dig yourself out of debt!

This game is a third person action roguelike devleoped in Unreal Engine 5 by a talented team of 8 designers

Game Gallery

Level Design

One of the many challenges of this project was designing around procedural generation. I had to create many “tiles” that had a lot of parameters that needed to be consistent. They needed to be the same size, have enemies already spawned, have all assets placed on them, and must all connect and work with each other by using a socket system. For example if one side of the tile was labeled “1” then all the tiles that connect to it must also be labeled that same number. I had to balance a lot of consistency while also remaining player interest. This also made encounter design extremely difficult and interesting to balance!

To the right is an image with all the tiles I made for the game, the gambling island is up top in the first image. This island is NOT procedurally generated for the sake of player use of the currency/gambling mechanic. As well as an example of what the generation looked like.

Encounter Design!

In this project I handled all of the encounter design and general balancing work in terms of damage numbers, enemy speed, values, animation montages, and more!

The general encounter design was very tough as I had to put the enemies on each tile, meaning there was no way for me to reliably predict how many enemies would be in a level. I had to test a lot of different combinations, but as a general flow I ended up adding enemies to about half the tiles in groups of 1 or 2. As the project was not in development for long, these numbers only had about a week or two to test before we shipped. I had to be quick, intuitive, and snappy with these best I could

Postmortem

Throughout this entire project I learned so much about myself and working with others. We had many communication conflicts especially among the design team, and it realyl taught me the value of documenting everything and making sure things are heard by everyone. I had many technical personal challenges with Unreal Engine 5 as well. Making this project happen over an absolute roller coaster of a semester. It made me a stronger designer, and a better person. A project I am proud to feature on my portfolio.

Download the Project!

Here you can find a link to the itch page that we published our game on. Feel free to download for free and try it yourself!