Peblito’s Adventure

Peblito’s Adventure is a 3D adventure platformer. This is the original design for Studio Half-’s capstone game, later renamed Peblito: Rock and Roll. I began the design process by considering our capabilities and constraints as a team. Specifically, our team had two main limitations. First, we did not have a dedicated animator so we required a simple character with minimal animations which resulted in our rock-person character. Second, we had to scope for a seven-month development cycle (two months of pre-pro, four months of production, and one month of alpha) resulting in the multilayered, flexible framework. Once we had our character and genre, I iterated on the concept of the game which originally centered on an Ikaruga-like state changing ability but then changed to an emphasis on rolling. Next, I evaluated which audiences we could successfully target while abiding by the team-related constraints, resulting in our focus on the outdoorsy millennial extrovert. This audience enjoys flashy mechanics that make them feel accomplished without having to struggle through high learning curves and overly difficult challenges. My next step was to design several compounding systems to cater to our audience, facilitate contributions from the rest of the team, and embed flexibility into the design so that we could add or remove components to stay within scope.