All is Dust

About

U of U EAE student game.

I was the lead designer for this game. 

All Is Dust on Steam (steampowered.com)

Story
It’s the year 1931, and Oklahoma has been brought to its knees by the Dust Bowl. But the suffocating dust is the least of your problems...

Take on the role of Thomas Joad, a proud farmer and father. Over the course of three nights he tries to unravel the mysterious and horrific events that are plaguing his once beautiful land.


Explore the dried up farm to find clues to what’s going on. Evade and outsmart the dangers of the field. Unravel the events leading up to these horrific nights. Try to come to terms with your fragile existence.

All Is Dust.

Postmortum

I offered the project an overall direction and vision. I provided the setting, story, and characters. The team tried a variety of gameplay ideas, maps, and events, and I led the team through the iterations

I did my best to make everyone on the team feel heard, important, and have them contribute to the design of the game.  I don’t think I did it well or did it to the benefit of the game though, but because mostly everyone wanted to be a part of the process.  There was a lot of backtracking and compromising which I think held back the game from growing a gameplay feel of its own.  If I would have been more stern or perhaps more confident and persuasive with earlier design decisions the game might have had more of a personality to the gameplay.  But we didn’t have much preproduction time to flesh out the ideas and get everyone on the same page. Despite this we iterated a lot.  We went from 4 maps with teleporting corn, to 3 maps with teleporting doors, to 1 map with 3 nights.  We went from the idea of a dead man, to a fleshed out character with a history and a family.    

I did research into the Dust Bowl. I gave the team history lessons to help add authenticity to the setting and content.  I was a bit surprised they were on board with the black magic idea, but I am glad we went that direction.  It’s a video game so we have more leniency with the setting than a history report.  I wanted to get into it much earlier in the development process, having that be one of the main mechanical focuses of the game, but it was never really accepted until the end. The Let’s Plays have all said good things about the story, so it’s unfortunate we didn’t add more mechanics with black magic.    

Because hardly anyone on the team knew much about fear, or even scary movies/books, I did lots of research into the psychological effects of fear, and led many design meetings where we analyzed the elements of our game in an attempt to add the appropriate components of fear to specific elements of the game.  For example the corn is meant to evoke the sense of separation which is created from suspense and anticipation; the scarecrow is an example of mutilation which is caused by disgust and gore. Even though it’s not so much seen in the game I learned a lot about how to draw the player’s attention towards a harmless object, and then hit them with a jump scare (as seen in the barn after they pick up the second piece of paper).  I learned how to craft a pretty spooky environment through silhouette tricks, open and closed spaces, safe and dangerous places, and attention to detail.

I directed and did the storyboards for the cutscenes, animated 2 of them, and taught Binoy to do the others.  I wrote and acted the VOs. I coordinated our score and SFXs with an outsourced talent and oversaw the implementation of them. 

I designed all the maps, made the terrains, and compiled the navmeshes. I added the corn, the fences, the terrain textures, and many of the details, such as rocks and trees. The earlier design choices with the map, having more of a continuous direction and large landmarks on hills, might have been better for a general gameplay experience, because players would not have been as lost due to the visible landmarks.  But going for a realistic, flat farm setting added authenticity to the game and helped with the immersion.  However we tried to use the feeling of lost that the flat cornfields gave to our advantage (discussed earlier), and I learned the benefit of in-game maps, point lights, and paths.  All and all I learned quite a bit about the balance between realism and functionality.  I imagine that if we added a simple compass to the game then it might solve lots of problems.  The final map is the hub and spoke design, branching out from the center and returning. We felt this was the best design for us because we had a single level and non-linear exploration.  The hub and spoke helps reduce the amount of backtracking.  And that worked well because the central point is a place of reprieve, so if the player wants to rest they know where to go.

I directed and edited the trailers. I went through 4 or 5 different ideas and styles, and am pleased with the final product. 

Putting the game on Greenlight was a good decision. I helped the publicity of the game by getting some YouTubers to do Let’s Plays. I learned that it doesn’t take as much as I thought it would to get people interested in an interesting game. I would rather have had done some promotion work earlier on in the project to get outside feedback, and to start to build a fanbase, but that wasn’t much of my role on the team.