Sands Adrift (2023)
About
Sands Adrift is a game that I created along with a team of 14 others as part of the DADIU program. The Game is an Atmospheric, Explorative Movement game about guiding the Spirits of the Dead through a vast and strange underworld wasteland. I served as the Game and Level Design Lead on the project. In this position I worked with the Game Director and Art Director to develop the vision of the game and I worked with the Tech team to define and develop mechanics and features that expressed the game's concepts.
Project Info
Role:
Game Design Lead, Sound / Music Designer
Time Frame:
4 Months
Team Size:
14
Tools Used:
Unity, C#, FMOD, Logic Pro
Trailer
Introduction
I began the DADIU semester as one of three Game and Level Designers. Shortly after the start of the project, I was elected to be the team lead to help organise and distribute the responsibilities of the department. Sands Adrift went through many different iterations throughout the process, but the core 'toy' gameplay element that we kept returning to was a kind of fluid diving / gliding surfing-like movement, where the world's terrain acts as the playground for the player to experiment with. This central feature linked the Gameplay and Level design very closely and required our team to consider the world design from a fun-first perspective that still always respected the world building and art direction.
Final 'One-Pager' document of Sands Adrift
Key Features
Game Mechanics
Gameplay Loop and GIF of the core gameplay.
The game's core mechanic revolved around a simple 'diving' and 'gliding' type of action where the player picks up momentum down slopes and then uses this momentum to take off into the air and glide. Placed around the game world are rings or 'nodes' through which the player must skilfully manoeuvre to activate them. Once all nodes in a section have been activated, the player can travel to and hit a terminating 'pylon' to complete the section and unlock the next one.
For the specific feel and behaviour of the movement I received a good recommendation from my mentor Shalev Moran regarding. the game Exo One. From here I also guided the team into taking inspiration from recent 'movement-focused' games such as Solar Ash and The Pathless
State flow diagram of the core movement system
Level Design
Throughout the project we went through several iterations of how the level should be structured, ranging from Arena type levels, Open World design, and finally settling on a large single world split into sections which are gated off from one another. As the team lead, It was my responsibility to define and describe the design rules for Sands Adrift's levels and ensure that the team were delivering these correctly.
Because Sands Adrift is an environment-traversal based movement game, the fundamental layer of level design was to create beautiful terrain that is rich in gameplay affordances.
As lead designer, I suggested that we use the Unity asset MapMagic to create procedural, yet highly authorable terrain. The team iterated on the terrain to create different terrain features and characteristics and blended them carefully so that the terrain naturally varies over the course of the player's journey, meaning they have to adapt their playing, keeping the gameplay challenging and engaging throughout the whole game.
Showcase of work in progress Terrain and MapMagic graphs.
In addition to the Terrain variance, we wanted each section of the world to have a distinct character and silhouette. So I both laid out some high-level descriptive design 'taglines' for each section, which could also be useful to the Art team, and also some more detailed requirements for the level design and set dressing of each section.
These designs were eventually realised in the final game
The experience working on this project was quite different than previous school projects. Namely, the scale of the production, with a team size of 15, was much larger than anything I had worked on before. Within this large group I also functioned as part of the lead team, so I was present in overall production meetings and steering the design of the game along with the other leads. Also, positioned as the Game Design lead, I felt that I was often the connective tissue between other key departments such as Art and Tech/Programming, so I got to sharpen my ability to communicate with people from very different practices in order to deliver a cohesive vision.
I also strived in this project to create coherent and updated design documentation as a simple 'source of truth' in the project to keep everyone aligned. It was challenging finding the right balance of detail in such a fast changing project so that the documentation continued to reflect the current state of things, without being an endless time-consuming chore that detracted from development.
Because of the level of team leading and higher-level design thinking and directing, I had less involvement in the nuts and bolts technical development than usual, but I was fortunate enough to be able to contribute the Sound Design and Music to the game as our DADIU team lacked this position.
What I Learned
