Cassy Cornish

Survival of the Cutest

Survival Horror - Dark Humour - First Person

Can a kind little bunny doll survive when an action toy invades her doll house?

Play as Janey and help her escape from Sergeant Shredder as he relentlessly chases her and the other dolls throughout the doll house. Follow your stuffed heart to find different leads and friends to help you in your quest. However... if things don't go quite as planned you can throw items (...or friends) to buy yourself precious seconds.

View Rookies breakdown

Chase and throwing gameplay

Hiding under the bed gameplay

Team Photo!

Chase and throwing gameplay

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Role: Technical Designer

Format: Unreal 5 Game

Project Type: Student

Team: Away From Home

Team Size: 14 developers

Duration: Oct 23 - May 24

Personal Contributions (hover over!)

White boxing

Setting up prototype level design environments, colliders, triggers, UI, and actors. As well as adjusting AI Navmesh values and 3Cs for the scene.

Documentation

Using documents to layout system designs and quest beats, then creating logical flowcharts of the quests with gameplay.

Cutscenes

Creating cutscenes and cinematics in Unreal Sequencer from white boxing transforms and keyframing triggers to adding dialogue and importing animations.

Production

Frequently touching base with every member and offering support, coordinating extra meetings to resolve issues, and using Trello for task management.

Version Control

Using Git repositories via the client Fork and git flow to manage many branches of development. Utilising Git Issues to track and provide data on bugs.

Additional Inputs

Roles & Responsibilities

Made guides to help onboard teammates with Git and systems.

Made early level designs and blockouts to test game feel and experiment with scale.

Organised and maintained the team's OneDrive for storing and displaying completed and in-progress work.

Contributed to writing a green light pitch deck and presented it.

Often compiled builds.

Technical Design

Gaining a full understanding of custom and built-in systems, then creating guides and helping designers (and other team members) to use them.

Designing to make implementation easier for other developers, such as redesigning the programmers' prototype quest and dialogue systems to use Data Tables to
- Make large amounts of data easier to read and navigate.
- Allow writers to contribute to the process by exporting dialogue lines as .csv files.

Working with Unreal Blueprints to set up events and triggers (including for cutscenes), and to investigate bugs with programmers.

Quest Design

Collaborating with writers to turn their story beats into varied and fun quest beats, and communicating with programmers and other designers to ensure that any features required are easily implemented.

Creating detailed Miro flowcharts for each step of quests and cinematic sequences including information on triggers, voice lines used, locations etc.

Cinematic Blockouts

I've used the UE5 Sequencer to build cinematics for this game. In the timeline-type interface I keyframe the camera and actor positions as well as dialogue lines, call events to existing and custom functions/Blueprints, and more. While developing sequences I constantly test to ensure that the player can't accidentally trigger wrong events or at wrong times etc.

Here is an early iteration of the intro/tutorial section to onboard the player to the world, characters, mechanics (in a friendlier context) and tone.

Overall Quest Design

Intro Sequence Design

Overall Quest Design

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Quest and Cinematic Design

Throughout this project our team has used flowcharts that I've designed in Miro as reference for quest and sequence structure.

The quest flowchart is split into main and sub quests with their main beats, locations, triggers, checkpoints, and additional info attached.

The intro sequence flowchart is formatted similarly but also has details on the camera and relevant voice lines with a link to the spreadsheet containing the game's script.