The Inner Friend

How I got there

After leaving Ubisoft Singapore in 2016, I backpacked around the world for nearly 2 years; stretching my savings as long I could.
I really enjoyed travelling and doing a bit of hobby gamedev, so when it came time to earn money again, I wanted to see if I could travel and work at the same time.
When I passed by Montreal, a former coworker now in the local industry put me on a list of available freelancers and I got lucky, the director of Playmind contacted me shortly afterwards.
I spent 1.5 months on site and then 1.5 months working remotely.

What I got to work on

Since the Inner Friend team was focused on completing the scope of the game for the last 3 months of production, the team agreed to let me work on existing elements that were lacking and bring them to ‘good enough’ standard; with a focus on the beginning of the game.

Thanks to that I affected the following levels

• Intro: reworked the camera design and its controls controls
• Floating City:
  • simplified the design requirements to reduce the need for assets
  • designed the way the floating blocks come in and out, instead of them scaling out of the fog
• High-school:
  • implemented better sign and feedbacks for the puzzles sequences
  • tightened the timing and condition of the scripted events to better serve the tension.
  • Reused tech art assets to create the standalone red-beam ingredients I added in the last corridor to provide more tension.
• Museum:
  • compressed the level layout to avoid long corridors
  • rebalanced the stealth mechanic to be more forgiving and increase the sense of “near-miss”
• Parking Lot:
  • Using the high level direction and keeping the same cut scenes; repitched the level from the ground up and implemented all of it (sinking blocks, wavey facade)
• Powerplant:
  • helped refined the narrative intent and the mechanics of the backyard games.
    

I did most of my work using Unreal Blueprint system and a did a bit of C++ in the legacy system for the floating city.

I also got to echo concerns from the floor team about scope and, because of my experience in AAA, I managed to convince the director to cut and simplify content to limit crunch.

Take-aways

I loved this collaboration because, it was my first time creating final content for a game.
At my previous jobs, I had the chance to pitch and prototype gameplay ingredients as well as influence the design of certain game systems, but I never got to craft what the final content would be like, including minute elements that I think really shape the user experience.

So, it was really cool to be able to do that on Inner Friend both because I got to drive the specifics of level design, animation and sound designs with the other team members and crucially, I got to see players emotional reaction to the choices I made; and see what worked and what didn’t.

I also really enjoyed trying to have the biggest impact on the smallest budget – it felt like being a game editor or gameplay closer role – and it was also pretty gratifying to help a mostly junior team avoid making

I really enjoyed practising all those aspects of gamedev and I wish I could do that more often.

Engine: Unreal 4.12, mostly in Blueprint but with some C++ as well