Dreamland Confectionery

Announcement trailer for Dreamland Confectionery!

Description

Developed in Unity, Dreamland Confectionery is a comforting, reactive, and visually rich narratively-driven adventure game about baking, exploring, and awakening a lost world. Dive into the world of Oceanos, meet the sleeping remnants of Ami's childhood creations, and grow your recipe book as you unravel their story.

I worked on this project as Lead World Designer from August 2020 to July 2021, contributing to the design and development of key systems, as well as working with the art team to create grayboxes that aligned with the director's vision.

Currently the game has been announced and is available to wishlist on: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1612560/Dreamland_Confectionery/

My Role as Lead Designer

Met with the Director and other departments to design key systems such as the behavior/reaction and central baking system.
Worked on the design, grayboxing, and set dressing of the different areas of the game, while abiding by design requirements and focusing on the player experience.

Documenting design processes and mechanics for the team to focus their feature and system-making
Closely collaborated with fellow department leads to utilize their knowledge and feedback to best execute design decisions.

A slide of Art's moodboard halfway through the cave's development, with paintovers of early graybox work informing the aesthetic vision and subsequent iterations of the level.

Level Design Layout

I worked with the creative director to solidify the vision for the levels, collaborating with the Art team's resources like mood/vision boards and concept art for the design team (myself included) to more easily graybox out key areas like the cave level and the tree interior.

The development process would usually begin with a moodboard from art and the creative director, which we would use to sketch out initial level designs for feedback. After addressing the feedback on it, we would make early blockouts in accordance with the sketches, which in turn would undergo paintovers and inform subsequent iterations for level design, set dressing, and art asset creation.

Here is a snippet of some of an internal spreadsheet used to organize and record the different kinds of interactions that different Spirits would exhibit in response to different player input.

Behavior/Reaction System

I worked closely with fellow designers and the creative director to come up with the behavior-reaction system with the goal of creating a reactive world that truly felt alive and capable of acknowledging the player's different actions.

This work consisted of going through the different kinds of creatures in the world, and coming up with unique, predictable behaviors that were consistent with both their different personality types and the player's actions and abilities.

The benefits of such a system means that it would be easier to tutorialize the expected behavior from Spirits reacting to different player actions, and on the implementation side, it would allow for Spirits to have different behaviors to respond to input without having to create a unique behavior for every single one. This allowed for design, implementation, and player clarity on the system.