Standard Procedure
About the Game
You play as a full-time overworked doctor who also practices in the ways of the bomohs, serving as your kampung’s local doctor.
One day an unconscious disfigured patient in need of saving is brought forth to you, discovering that demons have taken possession over various parts of the patient’s body.
An urgent matter, you must utilize your skills in both the medical and mystical field as you challenge these demons to a card battle in a race against time in order to save the patient’s life.
Game Engine
Design Process
Concepting
This project was apart of my GPS1 subject whereby I was grouped randomly with people from my semeser to make a game. We were given the groupings and the theme for the project during Chinese New Year. The theme for this project was "Locked-in" and I, alongside my fellow designers, quickly locked in to work with our artists and techs to come up with 3 ideas to pitch to the lecturers.
During the pitch, an idea was chosen by the lecturers but they gave it a twist. The original was supposed to have the player play as the patient fight their inner demons through a card duel. However, the twist that was given was that we now had to play as the doctor trying to save the patient from these demons. The other twists were that our card deck had to be 2 different kinds, and no number based, meaning that the cards could deal numbered damage and could only do causes and effects. With this in mind, we immediately started preparing for our repitch.
Us designers struggled quite a bit to settle on how we should make the game work. We bickered back and forth until I decided that we should seek our lecturers for advices. This was the right call as our lecturers helped us to narrow down our ideas and come to a point where we could all agree on something. I helped to concept the idea of our game Malaysian themed, to which our lecturers loved it. Hence after our second pitch, we immediately took note of lecturer feedback and started pre-production.
Pre-Production
Through the lecturers advice, we split our roles accordingly. Hence I was designated as the narrative and level designer for the game. During pre-production, I mainly planned out how the narrative for our game would go, brainstorming with the other designers and also with our lead artist. Through several revisions, the major part of the story for the game would be finalized by the 3rd week. The game's narrative and some visuals involving quite a number of Malaysia elements, mainly our demons. 3 of the demons are inspired by our local Toyols, Malaysian goblins from our local folklore. The last demon was made up by me as I wanted to create something unique that has Malaysian elements to it. That demon would be the boss of the 3 Toyols, and his name would be Duri-Duri. Heavily inspired by durians, I created a fake myth where people who try to harvest durians before harvesting season would be severely punished by Duri-Duri. Later weeks I would continue to tweak the story according to our development process, more on that under the production stage.
Also during this time, I made wireframe mockups for how each of the levels should look like. This was the part where I struggled quite a bit as I yet again brainstormed with the other designers and lead artist on the angle of the patient in the background, as well as card and UI layouts. Originally we wanted to go for a 2.5D look for the level. However, the lecturers heavily advised against going this direction and hence we kept the game at 2D with a top-down view over the patient's body, as well as the cards.
During that time I also made some wireframe mockups for how our menus would look like. I had the idea of having a clipboard be brought up whenever players go into settings or pause menu. That idea would later extend to the main menu too.
Lastly, I also started with documentation early on, prepping our Game Design Document and making an Art Asset List for our artists.
Early Level Mockups
Art Asset Lists
Story Overview
Production
Entering the production stage. I continued to work with artists as they started to sketch and draw out our game's UI. During this time, I would also confirm with our lead artist the font we would use for our game, that being the "Stylish" font from Google.
I had also created both the Art Bible and Tech Document for both our artists and techs to help them get started on their own documentations. I even helped to format their documents.
It was also during production where I started to concept and plan out the tutorial level for our game as a way to teach players. I originally ran through a few ideas, ultimately trying to decide between 2 different ideas: one where a Toyol is mocking you for being bad and therefore he helps you, and the other where the player would have an assistant helping to guide them. To not give extra work to the artists, the lecturers advised us to go with the first iteration of the Toyol teaching the player.
I immediately started thinking of how the tutorial level will flow, creating more wireframe mockups.
I would also start doing a Sound Asset List as I prepped to get ready to do sound designing for our game.
While doing that, I also worked on the dialogues for our tutorial level. Like with the story, I also continuously worked the dialogues, trying to give it a Malaysian feel and have it match our story. Eventually it got to a point where the story had to be slightly altered to match with tutorial dialogues for it to make sense. The story also changed from a patient being paralyzed and secretly possessed to now just a patient being very obviously possessed and showing signs of it.
As I worked on the sound designing, my lead artist volunteered to help voice the sounds for both the Toyols and Duri-Duri. My initial idea was to have 4 members from my team to each voice a Toyol/Duri-Duri. However, I was only able to get 2 before I was told to just stick with 1 person and have that person be the voice for everything. My original idea was to also have the voices sound monotonous similar to Undertale, again I was shut down by my team and was told to make it sound similar to animalese from Animal Crossings. I struggled a bit, and with the finished edited audio sounding somewhat low quality, my design lead was luckily enough to get his friend work on the SFX. Hence, I passed on all my sound roles to his friend. His friend was experienced in sounds as the audio his friend made was 100x better than mine.
Going back to how I wanted the Toyol/Duri-Duri to have a monotonous tone, well the lecturers told us to have them sound like that rather than animalese.
Also, a little fun fact while I was still editing the sounds. When I started working on Duri-Duri, for some reason it just started to bug out and sound very demonic, looping fast and repeatedly before crashing my audio software, corrupting the file. I was able to recover it, but it was a weird incident.
Nearing the end of the production phase, I started to write flavor texts for the other levels in order to give them more life, giving personalities to every Toyol and Duri-Duri too. At the same time, I also started storyboarding for cutscenes, to which our game would have 2 different cutscenes, one where players first launch the game, and another after players have defeated Duri-Duri. It was also during this same time where I finally finalized the story and the tutorial dialogues after weeks and weeks of revisions.
Sound Asset List
Dialogue List
Game Screenshots
Throughout development, we also conducted several playtests between each other. We did both paper tests and digital tests for our game.
5 external participants also play tested the Vertical Slice build of our game, giving their honest reviews and feedbacks.
More participants will involved soon.
The game is currently still in development and the final build of the game is TBA.
Overall I really enjoyed working with my current team, although there were hiccups at the starts, we stayed strong together thanks to effective communication, and that we also just tried to have as much fun as we can while making the game.
Game
Standard Procedure can be found on itch.io here.