Overview

Keepers of the Trees is a co-op puzzle platformer that I am developing as a capstone project, along with a team of fellow graduate students at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy. The game follows the adventures of the titular Keepers, mystical beings entrusted with watching over the forest that they call home. They possess the ability to manipulate the growth of plants, allowing players to use them to solve puzzles and explore the environment.

The initial design of the game stems from a game design document that I created in my first semester at FIEA, which won 1st place in the annual game design “shootout” and tied my professor for the best-scoring GDD in the history of the school.

Roles and Responsibilities

I am the team’s lead designer, responsible for guiding the design of the game’s mechanics, narrative, themes, and tone; ensuring that assets, levels, and gameplay implementation fit the intended design; and managing the team’s tech designers and level designers.

In addition, I am serving as a technical designer, responsible for implementing gameplay in both Blueprints and C++. Working along with our lead programmer to act as liaisons between our programming team and tech design team, a large part of my tech design role involves working in C++ to implement new features or expose functionality created by other programmers to be easily accessible by the tech designers and level designers in Blueprints.

I am also implementing the game’s audio design and composing its music. I am using the FMOD middleware tool to create dynamic audio feedback and sound effects, as well as dynamic music that conforms to the gameplay and narrative beats. A track that I composed can be heard in the gameplay demo video above, which also showcases the dynamic music in action, with the track shifting to the appropriate sections in tandem with certain action blocks in the level.