Happy Trails

Role: Technical Designer
Genre: Shooting / Arcade
Development Time: 3 Months
Team Size: 10
Engine: Unity

Happy Trails is a 3D Virtual Reality gun-slinging cocktail-making recipe game where you shoot ingredients above glasses to fulfill orders. In your Wild-West bar wagon, perform fancy tricks and shoot ingredients with style to leave customers with a happy full belly!

Presented at Youmacon in November 2023 in Detroit.

Responsibilities:

  • Redesign gameplay loop and create interactable systems

  • Create tutorial for players both brand new to Virtual Reality and new and returning players

  • Design wagon with fully interactable environment and UI menus

  • Asset implementation and scene set dressing with assets, post processing, etc.

  • Collaborating with programmers to implement designed systems into full gameplay loop

INTUITIVE TUTORIAL

One of my primary tasks as designer was to create a functional and intuitive tutorial system for first time VR users. I started by prototyping and implementing a tutorial system that would take players through a step-by-step process, creating visuals called “Gunslinger Guidebooks” that showed a Meta Quest 2 controller with highlighted buttons. The tutorial prompts the player to perform the most essential tasks of the gameplay, ranging from basic tasks like picking up and shooting the gun, to reloading and performing spinning tricks. Upon gaining player feedback from the tutorial, the Gunslinger’s Guidebook was reworked into the main menu of the game, with steps available at any time to the player, rather than locking it behind a strict sequential tutorial scene.

READJUSTING SYSTEMS

I was responsible for adjusting the flow of the gameplay, both with how the game would work and what a single playthrough would look like. I joined the project after the initial ideation phase in a previous course, and was able to add a new perspective to what the initial idea was. Through a series of prototypes and playtests, we were able to determine where to cut features, like having large orders that must be done perfectly for a monetary gain, are refactor it into a system of 3’s. Initially, any ingredient would fly by on an arc and the game suffered from a lack of clarity, and orders would vary in their ingredient size. I drafted the system to switch to 3 of everything, with 3 linear rows for drinks, fruits, and garnishes, with each order displaying 3 ingredients to a recipe. I made it so each order would reward the player for finishing all 3 ingredients, but not punish the player for missing out. These changes significantly increased the clarity of the game to players, and drove an increase of replayability and more advanced skill shooting.

INTERACTIVE ENVIRONMENT

In tune with the theming of the game, I designed a cocktail wagon that the player would spend their time in within the game. This started with a series of drawings and mockups, and later led to the implementation of the wagon asset made by our 3D artist. Interactables in the scene had to be both visible and readily available, such as the clock for the dead-eye system, the recipe cards, the ingredients themselves, the customers, the register, and the bullet buckets. Through multiple iterations of redesigns based off playtester feedback, I was able to have a cart that allowed the player easy access to everything they would interact with in the game, and then implemented shootable UI menus for pausing and settings.