Cookie Point
Technical Designer
Mobile casual game
Mobile Game - Technical Game Design Internship at NVIZZIO Creations (2022-2023)
About The Game
Nvizzio hired a group of 5 students interns to do some RnD to define the production cost of casual game. We were supervised by the vice CEO of the company Kim Pasquin and had multiple milestones to follow.
Our mission was to devellop a game similar to Two Dots on unity using art from the asset store
Details
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8 weeks (full-time)
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5 people
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Tools
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Unity 3D​ and Unity Assets
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Google Workspace (documentation)
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Perforce Helix Core (versioning)
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Responsibilities
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Game Design
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Programming
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A Prototype
The objective of our internship was to develop a high-quality prototype within eight weeks, with a strong focus on delivering an exceptional first-time user experience. We aimed to create gameplay that was easy to learn yet challenging enough to keep players engaged and motivated.
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As a Tech Designer
My primary contribution as a technical designer was focused on exploring programming aspects of the game and developing innovative tools to help the development process.
Do tween UI Tweener
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I used the DoTween library to create a tool for easily animating UI elements, which was utilized for both UI components and cinematic sequences.
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Users can choose the type of animation they want (movement, rotation, scaling, shaking, etc.) and customize it with ease types, looping, and other behaviors provided by DoTween.
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To streamline the process, I implemented an enumerator-based system to manage variables and facilitate communication, allowing users to create simple animations with just a few clicks.
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While I considered adding sequencing functionality, I ultimately chose to keep the tool focused on smaller animations. For complex sequences, a different approach may be more suitable.
Game Event and Observer Pattern
I mainly worked on the game design, focusing on the gameplay ideas and the LDOs (Level Design Objects).
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Since I worked across multiple systems, some of which were developed by other designers, I needed to minimize dependencies. To address this, I followed Ryan Hipple's talk on using Scriptable Objects within a game project.
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The main challenge with the observer pattern is that objects reference each other, making it difficult to track what is observing what, especially if you're not familiar with the structure. To tackle this, I ensured consistency in how I implemented the observer pattern.
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All game event listeners are placed as empty children of the manager that listens for the event. Function calls triggered by a game event are written as Listener_<myFunction>(), and game events are always defined in their own separate header or serialized class.
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Although this approach requires additional upfront work, it significantly simplifies maintenance, understanding, debugging, and scalability in the long run.
Setting Event scriptable object to your script
Setting Event listener linked to the event scriptable object and triggering the function(s) registered below
Exemple of how i get my hierarchy organized with observer pattern since it remove references from the script