Tteokbokki’s Kitchen
Cat-astrophe
Type: 5-person team
Role: Design Lead, Level Designer, Narrative Designer
Publisher: DigiPen Institute of Technology
GAME overview
Created by four beginner designers and one artist, this top-down, stealth game will deceive you with its cuteness. The protagonist, a piece of Tteokbokki, is on a mission to rescue all her fishcake cats.
In this short experience, the player must explore the world food kitchen and help Tteokbokki rescue her cats without being noticed by the desserts. hide, sprint, and throw distractions to reach her precious pets!
Level Design
Conversations
In my first role as a level designer, I made sure to do plenty of research into stealth games to create a well-rounded strategic experience. I wanted the player to feel clever and hopeful, combining tense gameplay with a lighthearted tone.
Unfortunately, I lost the Pages with my initial designs. The game originally had 5 small levels. I drew about 15 mock-ups of these 30 and 60-second levels on paper, but our design shifted to become one singular level. The bubble map above was the first step I took to create these mock-ups. I wanted to get the pacing and feeling right before I got started.
Phase One
Undocumented
Phase Two
Once our concept shifted to becoming a singular level, I made sure to create multiple paths to allow the plyer to strategize on the fly and approach each section in whatever order they found best for them.
The result made each main gameplay section feel boxed in and the enemies’ mechanics were not well highlighted. The overall level seemed too small, as well.
Phase Three
The Second Iteration: Expanding the gamespace and creating more opportunities to interact with enemies and learn their patterns.
There was a lot of space that was not utilized that could have been more populated by enemies. I made some adjustments in editor, which turned the level into the one pictured below.
Because of the space issue, I made more obstructions and placed more enemies, changing the locations of some of the goals, and placing them more towards the bottom of the map. I overlayed it onto the current version to better communicate the idea to the team. While this is the final design, I’ve found that the top of the map is rarely explored as the goal locations disincentivize exploration on the top of the map.
Documentation
This is the first Game Design Document I ever made. It gives an overview of some basic design decisions, but it is not very descriptive and is at times confusing. Since this project, I’ve learned how to make a descriptive GDD that centers the audience while giving the whole team the necessary foundation they need to get started.
Playtesting
Over the duration of this three-month project, I playtested nine times to get timely feedback from fresh eyes.
Most of my playtests were conducted at the Redmond Library.
For the last playtests I conducted, I took notes on paper and transcribed them to a Google Document to later write a report. This was mostly to present the necessary information to the rest of the team to discuss design changes.
Since this project, my playtests have gotten notably more descriptive and actionable. This is most notable in Dine N’ Bash.
Reflection
Since this was the first finished game I made, there was a fairly large learning curve. I had to learn how to properly scope the project, not only as the Design Lead, but as the owner of the original proposal. A big part of the project was bouncing ideas off each other, which I had to learn how to do efficiently. Though there were some bugs in the final game and the level design is weak, I’m proud of the work we did and my growth as a designer.