In the second part of my post on the 2018 Global Game Jam I’ll be going over the general implementation I worked on for the game. When it comes to game engine and implementation, I love being a generalist. It allows me to facilitate others in making progress. From plugging in art for artists to hooking up scripts for programmers, each task allows me to see how the game comes together and how it functions. This allows me to better understand the game and when I make adjustments as a designer it gives me the ability to tweak a lot of things without breaking the game. Here is an example. Thi ..read more

In January, I participated in the 2018 Global Game Jam with a couple of my colleagues. In this post, I’ll be going over the specifics of the design work I did. I will be talking about Unity implementation in Part 2. Here is a brief overview of the game my team created for the jam. We came up with Carrier, a four player split-screen PVP game where the players are birds. The players could choose between being the predator (a Hawk) or the prey (a Carrier Pigeon). Hawks had to kill all pigeons in order to win. For the pigeons, only one had to deliver the message to the goal to win. Our team ..read more

This is my first prototype in Unity using PlayMaker. The goal of this project was to learn Playmaker and see how far I could take it to create gameplay quickly.  My idea was to create a prototype that mimicked Disney Infinity’s melee combat.   I created this prototype in 2 and a half weeks (100 hours). I did not make the environment, character model, or animations. The initial steps I took to start the prototype: Basic movement using Unity's Animation Controller 3rd person camera system Combos, jumps, and other combat moves Eventually I cut the jump because the ..read more

The general store UI is pretty straight forward. A button on the HUD opens up General Store UI where the player can select from different tabs to buy different objects for their restaurant. The player drags the object they want out of the UI and the object enters placement mode on their restaurant ..read more

I’ve talked a little bit about quest implementation in a previous post about my work at Zynga. For Ultimate Chef it was nice to be able to build a quest system from the ground up. I’ll go into more details about the quest system in a future post, but for this one it will just be focused on the Quest UI. Quest are a good way to provide players with game content.  It is also a good way to direct players so they become familiar with the gameplay, this can be done by giving them quest task that ask them to carry out the gameplay. Before the player sees the Quest UI they see the Quest Bar ..read more

UC-Workstation UI The workstation UI was most complex UIs in Ultimate Chef if not the most complex UI.  The workstation plays an important part in the game because it is where players use the ingredients they’ve gathered to craft all the dishes that are served to the customers. It drives the main gameplay (cooking), and the dishes the player crafts allows them to gain coin and xp which allows them to level up, buy things for their restaurant, and advance through the game. Since cooking is a core focus of Ultimate Chef, the UI is centrally focused around the dishes.  While this sho ..read more

I've been working as a game designer on Ultimate Chef for Glu Mobile.  We recently launched Ultimate Chef in Canada and a couple of other countries. I will go into more detail about the work I did on the game in future post. But for now here is a brief look at the game that I've been working on for the last 21 months ..read more

This is an overview of my work on Castleville Legends. Castleville Legends is a Zynga mobile game where players harvest crops, craft items, and send heroes on quest and adventures. The player also manages a gameboard (the kingdom) and places buildings and decorations on it. Castleville was already live when I was brought on, my main focus was working with the Design Team (Design) to create story driven events for DLC releases. The whole team usually had about 2 months to deliver the content. This meant we had 6 weeks of design and implementation and 2 weeks of play test, QA, and bug fix ..read more

Professional game design The transition from 3D art student to 3D industry professional was like night and day. The transition from amateur game designer to professional game designer was also just as drastic if not more so. I was no longer taking vague gameplay ideas and stumbling to develop that idea into engaging gameplay mechanics. The professionals I worked with had a structure and process to game design that really opened my eyes. From what I have learned, I believe that the process of game design happens in 4 different stages. The concept stage, the documentation stage, the implem ..read more

Hi, my name is Tien, I'm a game designer and this is my game design blog. I will be posting about my previous works and using this blog mostly as a game design portfolio. I will also post general game design concepts and ideas that I find interesting. So please allow me to tell you a little about my professional background. I went to the Art Institute of Portland for Game Art and Design. Although I was always interested in game design, I started out in the industry as a 3D artist. My general knowledge of game design was developed mostly through a few classes in school, indie projects, and we ..read more