Millennium-LA
A narrative, puzzle exploration game, set in Jianou city, China. Local historical figures guide the player through a developing city and invite the player to contribute to the development and urbanization of a city district.
This is the showcase video for the project that was made to demonstrate the overall concept for this project. Please note the art team used generative AI for some of the assets which feature in this demo-video.
I was hired at Millennium-LA to set up the company’s game department and to produce a game prototype. The overarching goal was to start creating interactive media that would give players the opportunity to engage with digital communities that are connected to physical spaces.
The final product of my internship was a demo for a mobile exploration game that takes place in Jianou city, China. The game features prominent parts of the city's geography and gives players opportunities to engage with characters who represent the real history of the city.
Millennium-LA: https://www.millennium-la.com/
Major Contributions:
Two paper prototypes:
A turn based strategy game that led the player through China’s local flora and fauna, teaching them about environmental sustainability along the way.
A narrative, puzzle exploration game, set in Jianou city, China. Local historical figures guide the player through a developing city and invite the player to contribute to the development and urbanization of a city district.
One digital prototype (based on the second paper prototype)
Mobile, narrative, puzzle exploration game that has simple examples of characters, puzzles, and exploration elements.
3D asset testing and pipeline documentation for artists working on games for the first time.
Pitch deck for the digital prototype.
Game production documentation:
Production pipelines for art, audio, design, engineering, and narrative.
Onboarding resources that explain the major components of a game production cycle for employees transferring over to games from other disciplines.
Additional commentary on project goals and game mechanics:
The fundamental goal for this product was to engage local communities with their developing city and provide an incentive for non-local players to consider traveling to the city. In order to cast a wide net, the game needed to be simple to pick up and engaging enough to get players to fall in love with the idea of Jianou city. This is why I opted to design a casual mobile game with bite-sized gameplay such as simple puzzles, an easy to follow narrative, and surface-level exploration. Players would be able to engage with a single character or puzzle at a time, then be rewarded with more content in different areas of the city. This would create an opportunity for players to explore the city over multiple play sessions and be not be overwhelmed during their initial introduction.
Since we were catering to a casual audience that may not have played heavy puzzle games, I designed a puzzle system that drew on physical puzzles most people have encountered before: sliding block puzzles. Instead of simply sliding blocks in cardinal directions, players could rotate blocks 90-degrees at a time in addition to sliding them. Furthermore, instead of selecting a single block, players make a 2x2 selection on the grid, and the chosen move action (slide or rotate) would affect all blocks in the selected area. This allowed for emergent gameplay and multiple possible solutions for each puzzle. In writing, the system might sound a bit complicated, but I conducted playtests using the paper prototype with casual mobile gamers, and people who had not played many digital games before, and found that a simple tutorial, paired with simple intro puzzles resulted in players from any background to develop an intuition for the mechanics within three to five minutes of gameplay.
The game is 3D but does not require the player to control the camera in order to accommodate a more casual audience. There is no jumping, climbing, or any other movement action outside of simple movement over a 2D plane. I made this decision to keep the potential mental stack as low as possible, so that a player who may have never used a physical or digital joystick to control a character would only have to learn the most basic movement in order to navigate the city. In addition to narrative elements, the simple puzzle system is narratively used to have the player engage with physical spaces in the city (organizing interior furniture, cleaning up a park, setting up a theater stage) . The sliding block-like puzzles are easy to incorporate into the world's physicality, easy to pick up and understand as a player, yet still allows space for a sense of mastery to develop.