Game Designer
The Last Dragon
ROLE
UI/UX Designer / Producer / Lead Playtester
DESCRIPTION
The Last Dragon is a 3D project centred around the sensation of flying. The player plays as a dragon in a children’s storybook. The player is living the narrative of a young dragon saving his family from the Darkness as it is being read to a young boy named Timmy as a bedtime story.
Duration
September 2017 to December 2018
Engine
Unity
PLATFORM
PC
Overview
The Last Dragon is a team project that was in development from September 2017 to December 2018. I served as UI designer as well as producer and lead playtester of OK Games, a four-member team. I was working alongside Gregor Smith, Jade Hymer, and Chris Underwood.
UI Design
The user interface, as well as The Last Dragon itself, has gone through many iterations. The original plan for the game was for the player to play as a human rider of a dragon, but we realised that having two play modes for flying and walking was too high of a scope for our time, and we changed this to playing as only the dragon. The narrative was originally about killing the Darkness in a world previously inhabited by humans.
Menu Iteration #1
The opening of the main menu started out with the camera facing a rock wall with a rune carved into it. After a couple seconds, the words “Press Start” appeared underneath the rune as seen on the left. Throughout all of this, a faint wind was playing in the background. This is meant to emulate the opening to the main menu of The Last of Us with its minimalism and allure for the player to continue. Once the player pressed the start button, the rune would shine and the screen would fade to white. Afterwards, the screen will fade back into colour, and the screen will be on the real main menu.
The opening of the main menu started out with the camera facing a rock wall with a rune carved into it. After a couple seconds, the words “Press Start” appeared underneath the rune as seen on the left. Throughout all of this, a faint wind was playing in the background. This is meant to emulate the opening to the main menu of The Last of Us with its minimalism and allure for the player to continue. Once the player pressed the start button, the rune would shine and the screen would fade to white. Afterwards, the screen will fade back into colour, and the screen will be on the real main menu.
This is the original wireframe for the pause menu. Like in The Last of Us, when the game pauses, the screen will darken and the text for the options will appear. This way, the player could still see the game but could take care of whatever options they needed to fix. Like the main menu, the text would change to runes when selected based off of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. While this wireframe displays all of the options in the centre, this was immediately changed to the upper left corner in implementation because having the options in the centre of the screen obstructed the game view I wished to preserve.
The video below shows the original implementation I did of these wireframes in the Unity Engine
Menu Iteration #2
After the game was changed to playing only as a dragon, the menu was changed from having a runic language to having a more modern feeling. The text and layout of the menu were inspired by the menu in Firewatch.
Menu Iteration #3
After the first semester of production, we as a team decided to take a look at our game and asses how we could enhance the feel of it. We didn’t have any artists on the team, so we all agreed that the art of our game was lacking, we decided to find an art style that we all could do and decided on child-like simple shapes. We decided to change the narrative of the game from a story of a young dragon defeating evil to the story of a young dragon defeating evil in a children’s book. This way, we could keep the art simple by making toy-like models and environments. The main menu was then changed to the storybook that is being read to the child in the narrative to give the player a better feeling of playing through the story. When the player presses Start Game, the story begins with a seamless transition from the menu to the storybook to keep the player immersed. A prototype without the voiceovers or drawings can be seen below.
Final Menu Iteration
The final iteration of the menu ended up being very similar to iteration #3. The menu was made skippable page by page so players could skip ahead in narration as the pleased. This change was done by Jade Hymer, as were the lighting and art polishes to the main and pause menus. I created the drawing art in the story as well as implemented the animations and sound effects for the book to read along with the narration. You can see the final version below:
Game Progres
The Last Dragon has gone through many iterations in its development, from being a dual protagonist game to sombre story of a dragon defeating evil to a more childlike adventure of a dragon saving his family. You can see various iterations and the current progress of the game in the videos below.