Inline: Out of Time - 2023
Genre: Precision Platformer
Engine: Custom (C++)
Platform: PC
Production period: Sept. 2022 - Apr. 2023
Team name: Parcel Dynamics
Team size: 12 (5 engineers, 1 audio, 3 designers, and 3 artists)
Full team credits: Skyler Boelts, Corbyn LaMar, Dylan Simpson, Damien Springer, Salem Richie, K Preston, Skylar Isaacs, Caiden Muro, Blake Tran, Benjamin Poot, Kira Shinoda, Simi Randhawa
Developed over the course of my second year at DigiPen on a custom C++ engine, Inline: Out of Time is a time-attack platformer which I headed as the team’s Design Lead.
In early 2024, we published the game on Steam via DigiPen.
My contributions…
As Design Lead, my role was twofold: I both laid out the initial game concept that the team was built around, as well as organizing the design timeline and working with our producer to moderate project scope. Rather than directing the team with a top-down approach, my goal was to take ideas and new discoveries from across the team and synthesize something new from them, involving even engineers and artists in the design process. This approach really helped us avoid burn-out and really turned Inline into everyone’s passion project.
In addition to serving as the team’s Design Lead, I also served as our primary Gameplay Systems Designer, Level Designer, and User Researcher. Our design team was dwarfed by our tech team, as we initially began with only two designers, and thus many hats had to be worn.
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With a focus on movement mastery and speedrunning above all else, my approach to design of the player controller was heavily influenced by 3D platformers and fast-paced FPS games, which presented two main challenges to overcome:
Most of my early emulation targets weren't 2D platformers, meaning that some of our mechanics didn't even have analogues in other 2D games; we were in experimental territory.
Given that our tech team was building a custom engine in parallel, we had to consider the limitations of a bespoke physics engine, rather than relying on something already built and feature-rich (as one would in a commercial engine).
Rather than being solved in a spreadsheet or script, these were easily overcome via communication; a frequent and evolving exchange of ideas between myself and members of my tech team (who had prior experience building and speedrunning 2D platformers) led to a better mutual understanding of the functional and systemic basis for our game; engineering informed systems design and vice versa, working together towards a unified UX goal.
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I prototyped 3 of our 4 levels, and collaborated with my UX designer to revise and polish all our level content across multiple iteration cycles.
The plan was to build level "vignettes"; room-sized encounters which could be strung together at gated checkpoints. In keeping each encounter siloed, expansion and revision passes became much easier to execute, as encounters could be edited, removed, or replaced individually within each level.
In order to facilitate rapid level prototyping, aiding designers and environment artists alike, I worked closely with an engineer to plan and build tile map functionality which would let team members edit the functional geometry and art of each level on separate tile layers; designers worked with a "programmer art" tile set that isn't rendered in-engine.
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I wrote our team's researching and playtesting parameters, gathering data in sets of 10-15 playtests at a time, at specific intervals throughout the production timeline.
These varied from full-fledged observational playtests of the game in a natural setting, all the way to bespoke prototypes tailored to test specific assets or functionality of the game.
I also spent a significant amount of time gathering public feedback on our early art concepts, which helped our art team hone the look and feel of our game in a matter of weeks, rather than months.