Millennium-LA
A mobile exploration puzzle game set in Jianou city.
This is the showcase video for the project that was made to demonstrate the overall concept for this project, using gameplay footage and additional promotional material.
I was hired at Millennium-LA to set up the company’s game department and to produce several prototypes. The overarching goal was to start creating interactive media that would give players the opportunity to engage with digital communities and have opportunities for digital identity development.
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 and gives players opportunities to engage with characters who represent the real history of the city and help these characters as their stories unfold.
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 demonstrates 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.
Thoughts on some of the design problems, solutions I attemped, and additional work:
The fundamental goal for this product was to engage local communities with their developing city and provide 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. The setting that made the most sense for this would be a casual mobile game with bite-sized gameplay; hence, simple puzzle, narrative, and exploration elements. Players would be able to engage with a single character or puzzle at a time and be rewarded with more content in different areas of the city to explore. This would create an opportunity for players to explore the city over multiple play sessions and not be so demanding that the game felt overwhelmed when being introduced to it.
Since we were catering to a casual audience that may not have played heavy puzzle games before, I designed a puzzle system that drew on physical puzzles that 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. Additionally, instead of selecting a single block, players would make a 2x2 selection on the grid, and the chosen move action (slide or rotate) would affect all selected blocks. This allowed for emergent gameplay and multiple possible solutions for each puzzle. In writing, the system sounds 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 at all, 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. In addition to narrative elements, the game features a simple puzzle system that allows players to contribute to the shape of the city. The sliding block-like puzzles are easy to incorporate into the world the player is exploring, easy to pick up and understand as a player, yet still allows space for a sense of mastery to develop.
Before starting work on a digital prototype, I also created two separate paper prototypes that had different goals in mind. One was a turn based strategy game that was designed to teach players about environmental sustainability, and the other was a precursor to the digital prototype.
Amid the prototyping, I also created reference documentation for production pipelines. The purpose of this documentation was to train other employees in the basics of game production and provide a collection of resources and materials that could be used to support further development. Many employees were working on multiple projects at a time, and all of my co-workers had never worked on games before, so the documentation was developed to be easy to pick up and understand for people without game production experience.