My Student Portfolio

This page contains work that I completed as part of an open-learning course for game design. It is not indicative of any projects that I have actually worked on.

Project 1: "The Reach"

1: Pitch Document

The first piece of work I ever finished for my open-learning course. To complete this, I had to fully outline a game from a marketing perspective. This covered considerations such as USP, monetization and an estimated cost breakdown. The perspective I chose was as someone who would be pitching from a favourite studio of mine: "Firaxis Games".

2: Narrative Document

A further development on my work for "The Reach", this document reads as a script, much like a screenwriter would use to describe what the player can see and do. It starts by setting the scene and proceeds to outline the major story beats in the scene. This is the sort of writing that I really loved doing during my coursework.

3: Overview Documents

The last pieces of work I was to complete for "The Reach" project was a set of three documents that covered "High Concept", "Overview" and a flowchart that shows the decision tree for the whole story. I made things difficult for myself by picking a design that involved branching storylines. The flowchart gets..."complicated".

Project 2: "Red Dwarf: Far From Safe"

4: Story Bible

I moved on to creating design documents for a relatively simple handheld game. The brief called for the creation of a story bible that gives background to an established sci-fi universe. I picked one of my favourites: Red Dwarf.

5: Writer's Brief

To go hand-in-hand with the story bible, I wrote a writer's brief that outlined the tone and aesthetic of the game as I had envisioned it. The idea was to create a document that could be referred to by any third-party writer.

6: Concept Document

Similar to the "High Concept" document in Portfolio Piece 3, this was designed to help introduce the casual reader to the basic ideas behind RDFFS's design. It features details regarding gameplay, plot & marketing strategy.

7: Game Mechanics

This document and accompanying flowcharts are designed to outline how the player interacts with the game. This covers everything from the physical control scheme to the nature of the puzzles that the player would be encountering in the course of gameplay.

8: Level Design

For my level design piece, here are a set of images that were taken from a 3D model that I created in sketchup, and the model itself. This document outlines the reasoning behind the areas that have been chosen for inclusion in the game, and the characters that live within them.