JACK BRUCE
TECHNICAL DESIGN
The Underbrush
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Role: Co-Producer, Technical Designer
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Status: Published
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Team Size: 8 with 5 mentors from Blizzard Entertainment
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Duration: 16 Weeks
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Platforms: Windows, macOS
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Responsibilities:
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Reporting progress to our Blizzard mentors through Discord and weekly meetings.
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Helping create and pitch presentations to our peers and Blizzard mentors
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Preparing weekly game builds and updating our materials for the Blizzard mentors.
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Managing peer and mentor feedback to be addressed by the team.
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Assisting in coordinating team meetings and checking in with team progress.
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Helping complete the various documentation and paperwork needed for our workflow.
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Designing and documenting a majority of game systems such as the overall game loop, game managers, and cryptid interactions.
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Programming a large portion of game aspects such as the character controller, respawn mechanic, and story/dialogue system
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Collecting and transferring a majority of art and sound assets made by the team into working game assets and systems.
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Game Summary
The Underbrush is a 2.5D eerie adventure game where you play as Beans, an inquisitive young child who scours the woods in search of mythical cryptids while out camping with their father. The player must traverse the forest; solving puzzles, searching for clues, and capturing cryptids to show to their father. All the while, they must manage their ever-present fear of the dark which, if left unchecked, will send the player running back to their campsite to hide. I co-led the Underbrush team with guidance from our five mentors from Blizzard Studios, facilitating communication between our members and mentors, in addition to preparing materials for weekly progress/build meetings, designating tasks within the group, and working in a variety of other roles.
Light-based Design
As we created the Underbrush, we wanted the game atmosphere to match the feeling of walking a gloomy forest at night. We experimented with a few different ways of doing that such as hiding items, puzzles and other parts of the game in the shadows to encourage the player to explore the forest. On the flip side, I crafted our level design to be maze-like with winding paths to confuse the player just slightly while exploring. To counterbalance that sense of confusion, not only did we use light to guide the player through our level, but we also pushed them to think about light as they played the game by making it The Underbrush's main gameplay mechanic. The player needs to manage their torch's flame which is constantly dwindling or stand near another source of light to keep their fear in check. If the don't the darkness around them encroaches more and more on the players vision. Another source of light the players can find in the forest are fireflies. Fireflies are small patches of light the player can use to recover and also help lead the player around the level. The player is already motivated to follow them to combat their fear of the dark so having them serve as a subtle way of leading the player through our twisting and turning woods helped our players navigate without loosing the atmosphere we crafted.
