Lingering Legacy
Lingering Legacy is a linear, story-based third person action adventure RPG. You play as The Guardian, chosen by the Goddess of Knowledge as her Champion in the war raging between her two brothers, the Light God and the Dark God. You must find and destroy the Dark God's Champion in order to save the world from certain death.
My contributions to Lingering Legacy:
- Worked as the Lead Level Designer and Creative Director, overseeing all aspect's of the game's design
- Prototyped, built, and populated multiple levels, updating them as needed
- Worked with designers, art, programming, and narrative to ensure a cohesive design language throughout
- Designed the final boss, including narrative, mechanics, and animation style
- Revamped core movement/combat systems along with our programmer and other designers
- Redesigned/maintained the vision of a preexisting project
- Aided other team members with problems/tasks as necessary
- Wrote the GDD along with our other designers
- Designed the overall structure and flow of the game
- Storyboarded, programmed, and rigged all in-engine cutscenes using Unity's Timeline function
screenshots
Creative Director
When we were given this project, it was an open-world RPG called We Who Linger. At first, my team and I tried to make the original version of the game work but ultimately, we couldn't. The code base was messy, the core gameplay loop lent itself to boring, misguided gameplay, and the overall direction to the player was unclear.
I pitched the idea of changing the structure from an open-world to a linear, level-based game in order to streamline the narrative and flow for the player. This allowed the gameplay to derive from the story in a more natural way and helped us streamline both our design work and the experience for the player.
As Creative Director, I headed this change. Throughout development I have overseen all design decisions, taking into account each of team's thoughts and ideas along the way. We have blended all of our ideas together to create an exciting and memorable experience for the player to enjoy.
Final Boss Design
A very fun challenge for me while working on Lingering Legacy was designing the final boss. Early on in our revamp of We Who Linger, the team and I decided the ending to our game would be a final showdown between the player and the main antagonist of the game. Though, at the time, we didn't know who that was.
When it came time to finally design the final boss, I worked with our Lead Artist Sacha Gafney to create The Fallen Guardian. I wanted his move set to be a culmination of everything the player had seen throughout the game. Each of his attacks was a variation of some attack from our other enemies. He had a few tricks of his own, however, so there was still something entirely new for the player to discover.
Sadly, the programming and animation was too much for us to complete in the amount of time we had and he has been cut from development indefinitely. We made Lingering Legacy as our senior capstone project with a team of only six people, of which only two were programmers and not a single animator. Despite this, Sacha created an incredible 3D model of the final boss and was able to implement a few animations to get us by for a few cutscenes and screenshots.
The Fallen Guardian is intended to be released with the final version of Lingering Legacy.
**Update**
I am very happy to say that the Fallen Guardian was finished in time for the game's final release! We brought on an incredible programmer named Broc Edson to work with the AI and with my direction he was able to get the boss to a functional state!