Project Changeling

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Overview:

Project changeling is a 30-60 minutes narrative-focused open-world RPG demo, created by 5 designers in 2 months. The game focuses on social infiltration, and learning NPC secrets to take their appearance, unlocking new areas to explore and dialog options.

Responsibilities:

- Principal game designer: Create the vision and GDD for a narrative-focused Open-world RPG. Designing systems for social infiltration, physical infiltration, dialog, spying, collecting secrets and taking the physical shape of NPCs.

- Team management: Coordinate a team of 5 designers, prioritising features, managing scope, meetings, tasks, giving feedback, creating and updating technical documentation for the project needs.

- Mission design: Create a complex mission design flowchart for an open world game, with branching dialog and co-affecting events. Creation of flowcharts and 2D maps, working with level designers to manage pacing, visual guidance, emotion.

- Narrative design: Writing a narrative bible, characters, locations, events. Writing and integration of branching dialog in-engine (UE4).

- UX/UI & asset production: Design interfaces and produce 2D assets using Photoshop and 3D character models using a character generation tool.

Key features:

- Comedic light-fantasy writing

- Shapeshift into different NPCs with different tags for area access & physical abilities

- Dialogs which react to which shape the player has taken

- Mechanic of learning character secrets to unlock the ability to shapeshift into them.

- Spying on conversation

- Using physical character tags to parkour, sneak into small spaces, move heavy obstacles...

- Using social character tags to unlock different dialog options and access to different areas.

From left to right:

- Small extract of the quest flowchart

- Feature prioritisation matrix

- Spying on a conversation

- Parkour while shapeshifting into a 'Agile' character

- Learn a secret while exploring the environment

- UI of the shapeshifting interface.