Grocery Gauntlet

Unreal Engine 4.26.2
Lead Designer, UI/UX Designer, Narrative Designer
24 person team, 16 months

Still in production! Check back soon!
Here's a trailer to whet your appetite :)

What an incredible project this was to work on. I have never felt as connected to a game team as I did with Later Sk8ters. I didn't really know anybody on the team when we began working, but by the end I had formed powerful bonds with each and every member. I know it's kind of a "red flag" to say this, but this team really did feel like a family to me. When I started out on the team, I was hired as a base level narrative and UI/UX designer, but by the time of completion I had climbed through the ranks to become the game's Lead Designer!

Narrative

Every line of dialogue (spoken or in text) within the game was written by me, and I am very proud of the end result. Additionally, I was the trailer director and wrote the original script from which we iterated upon. The narrative style that we decided on meshed very well with our bright and zany art style. We wanted our characters to have a lot of personality and be very tongue in cheek, so the first thing I started by doing was writing a bunch of silly one-liners for each character to say. Randy was always meant to be the main character so we weren't surprised by his popularity, but when people started telling us how much they loved the announcer too it was a major source of pride for me.

Both Polly PA and Randy Retail have a number of unique lines with specific hooks throughout the game. Some of the hooks we created for the game were things like projectile hit and miss, Super Sale started (with a unique line for every food item), player victory, etc. My favorite line is spoken by Polly PA and has a chance of occurring whenever a player misses a projectile. Our Polly PA voice actress, Kylie Wallette (who also happens to be the Audio Lead for the game), absolutely nails the delivery and I can't help but giggle each time I hear it. In a perfect monotone with no inflection that still somehow carries with it a hint of disapproval, Polly PA can be heard saying "Optometry appointments available in the pharmacy from 9-5pm." It's such a silly and casual burn from the unfeeling robot that it often catches players off guard and leaves them laughing as well.

UI/UX

The beautiful final main menu!

Randy Retail telling the player about the store they're about to enter on the level select screen

The loading screen we made to teach the player basic game mechanics with its final art

HUD
Out of everything in the game, the HUD probably had the most revisions and iterations made upon it. From the first version I sketched in my notebook to the final version you can see in the game now was quite the journey.

Menus
We wanted our players to be immersed in the Grocery Gauntlet mythos from the moment they started up the game and accomplished this using a few simple solutions. The most noticeable is the little cartoon Randy Retail that appears on screen and explains each of the options as the players select them. He's a lot friendlier on the menus than he is in the game though! We did vigorous testing on each of his lines on the menu to make sure that they were clear in their meaning while also encouraging players to actually want to play the game. Our first iterations on the lines had the same style of snappy dialogue used for the announcer, but we found that they weren't received as well. There was a very tangible difference in player experience between written and spoken lines due to the tone of voice not being present in the pure text. Despite the fact that the lines were extremely similar, players reported that Randy Retail was funny and silly during gameplay but rude and sardonic in the menus. The difference a voice can make on the reception of narrative is incredible! This was the first time I worked on a game with voice acting, and the sheer power of it blew me away. There are so many small subtleties that a human voice can carry that written text simply can't, giving a much greater degree of freedom to narrative designers.
So we iterated! I rewrote all of the lines for the menus to be less sarcastic without losing the silliness we were going for. After a bit more testing and tweaking, we arrived at the lines you can see in game today!

Load Screen Tutorial
Partway through production, we decided to pivot and cut the "tutorial level" from the game. It was pretty clunky, took a while to play through, and was a relic from very early development that didn't reflect the current quality we had reached. But we still had to teach new players how to play the game.
So I doodled in my notebook some simple infographics for the game's main mechanics. We did a few rounds of playtesting using them instead of the tutorial level and found two things:
First, new players shown the infographics were playing the game within their first few rounds at more or less the same level of expertise as new players who played through the entire tutorial. Keep in mind that it took about 5 or so minutes to play through the tutorial, while the loading screen was shown to players for less than 10 seconds. Huge win.
Second, players who had previously played the tutorial and were shown the infographics enjoyed playing the game more when they didn't have to play through the tutorial. Even bigger win!
With this data in hand, we passed the infographics off to the art team and got back the lovely illustrations you can see there on the left.