Wake Up Whimsical Vampire is a project from my Junior year Rapid Prototyping class. We're given teams of ~10 and 4 weeks to create prototypes to expand on in our Senior capstone. While our class program is very Unity-centric, this team challenged ourselves to work in Unreal.

What Is My Role?

As a Designer on Wake Up Whimsical Vampire, I collaborated with other designers to create a cohesive level and learn Unreal.

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My responsibilities include:​​

• Level design

• Iteration

• Creating hierarchical state machines

• Writing GDD

• Presenting project pitch to professor

• Playtesting

• Giving feedback

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Hierarchical state machines are an underutilized tool in our department. I work to create flowcharts and hierarchical state machines for every project I take a design role on. Creating documentation like this early on helps us find issues in design and helps us clearly communicate with the programming team.

For this project, I created state machines for both types of characters in the game so we could think through their functionality before they were programmed. With only 4 weeks to work on a project, we don't have time to find out that the core of our game doesn't work once it's in engine. Time spent paper prototyping is time saved from crunching later.​