SAMSARA
OVERVIEW
Description:
Samsara is a 2D platformer developed as part of a week-long game jam with fellow Naughty Dog QA members. The game’s narrative follows a forest spirit with the ability to manipulate life as it tries to overcome the dark force invading its home.
Team Size:
8
Tools:
Unity, Visual Studio, C#
Platform:
PC
Year:
2023
RESPONSIBILITIES
Narrative Design:
Co-wrote overarching story and dialogue
Designed and scripted branching dialogue and cutscene systems in C#
Implemented all character conversations and cutscenes
Game Design:
Co-designed and scripted main ‘drain’ and ‘imbue’ traversal mechanics
Contributed to overall level design to ensure narrative cohesion and utilization of traversal mechanics
General:
Implemented all audio and UI
Assisted with coordination of characters and animation
NARRATIVE
Dialogue System:
For Samsara’s narrative, while a branching storyline wasn’t in scope given the project’s short duration, we still wanted to allow for a degree of player choice. To achieve this in addition to making the story feel more interactive, I set out to create a dialogue system that allowed for multiple dialogue options. Additionally, I made sure that the dialogue system could integrate with our cutscenes, as described in more detail below. Given I was not the sole narrative designer/writer working on the game, I had to make sure that the system was easy to use, even for those unfamiliar with C# scripting. I ultimately relied on Unity’s scriptable objects to achieve this, creating a special dialogue object that could link to other dialogue objects and plug into the overall system. Once I had set everything up, it became extremely easy to iterate on the story and adapt to changes made by both myself and teammates.
Cutscenes:
For Samsara’s cutscenes, much like the dialogue system, one of the foremost goals was to allow for player input. This was achieved in two respects. The first was through the dialogue system, which I integrated with Unity’s Timeline cinematic tools by creating a custom dialogue track that could pause cinematics and wait for player input before continuing. Similarly, I set up multiple instances throughout the game where the player would be prompted to use their Drain and Imbue powers during cutscenes, serving as a means to better align gameplay and narrative. The result was something similar to the dialogue system, where the cutscene will pause and display a prompt to the player, not continuing until they enter an input.
Gameplay
Core Mechanics:
The main mechanics of Samsara are the player character’s Drain and Imbue powers, which allow the player to grow, shrink, and otherwise interact with various level objects at the cost (or gain) of their light (aka their health). To realize these abilities, I worked with another designer on my team, who focused on the player health side of the equation while I focused on the visual elements and interactions with the level and narrative. The goal was to ensure the button holds were responsive, while making the growing and shrinking of objects inverse to the size of the player character’s light sphere/halo. By taking this approach, we were able to make the player’s health/power diegetic, mitigating the traditional UI in the game while creating further connectivity between gameplay and narrative.
Interaction with Level:
Once the framework for the abilities was set up, I got to work on creating and placing the level and narrative encounters in which the player could make use of their abilities. For traversal, this meant taking the assets our artists had made, attaching collision to them, and setting them to scale in specific directions as the player held down either of their abilities to create paths or clear obstacles. Narratively, the abilities came into play during the aforementioned cutscenes, in addition to the final boss “battle,” in which the player character must accept their darker half and use their drain ability to absorb rather than try and displace the darkness plaguing the forest.
Role:
Narrative and Game Designer
