Neon City
Neon City is a VR City Building Sandbox Toy. In this experience, players embark on a playful and meaningful experience of building a digital city for millions of lost AI citizens. It's a wooden block toy that can be dynamically zoomed in on and an emergent building experience akin to Townscaper.
This game is one of Advanced Game Projects(2022-2023) at USC Games.
GENRE: City-Building Sandbox Toy
TEAM SIZE: 25 students
DURATION: May 2022 - May 2023
TOOLS: Unity/Houdini/FMOD/Miro/Notion
PLATFORM: PCVR for Oculus Quest 2
DESIGN CHALLENGES
-
I haven't developed any VR game before.
-
Setup amusing rules for cubic building blocks and communicate them to players during their playthrough.
MY ROLE(As one of the 2 game designers on the team):
Gameplay Design
-
Starting with physical toys then many iterations of digital protypes, design the core game loop and the emergent city system
-
Concepted interwined experience of playing and narrative moments
System Design
-
Designed and prototyped for fundamental city blocks and systematic districts
-
Concepted the city blocks with various types and sizes and their relationships to create a context for players to experiment and build
-
Tweak numbers for the stats of building blocks and conditions for players to trigger a moment
Technical Design
-
Work with the writer to collectively prototype for the emergent narrative system for moments with different system outcomes
Early Screenshots
Playthrough
Design Process
from scratch to a cool VR toy
Physical Prototype
&Mind Maps
Physical prototypes:
-
Iterate weekly and grasp the "fun" part of this toy.
-
Test if fundamental rules work before we start coding, avoiding waste for VR development.
Mind maps:
-
Help with concepting gameplay ideas upon general background story. Start with a core then flesh out.
-
Easy to communicate design ideas or logic to other developers.
Collaborate With Engineers To Tweak Numbers
-
Every parameter of every type of building blocks is listed for thorough and rapid adjustments of numbers and difficulty.
-
A new set of numbers is submitted every week based on internal and external playtesters' feedbacks during the current week.
Build Emergent Narrative System
-
Work with the writer to concept and break down the structure of a NPC's emergent text. Set up the logic to take inputs of numbers from a moment and show different texts and numbers in different sentence structures acccrodingly.
-
Build a tool to emulate various input situations. Developers can get instant continuous output by tweaking parameters, saving time and energy when design juicy dialogues.