Cuttlefish
Engine: Touch Video
Genre: Live action thriller
Team: Flavourworks
Responsibilities
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Hero mechanic design
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Game feel
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UI/UX design
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Interaction design and planning
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Game Summary:
Cuttlefish is a live-action, narrative action/thriller game about infiltrating a ex-friend's shady lifestyle organization to enact retribution for swindling your mom. You play as Sam, thief known as The Cuttlefish for her ability to socially blend in and adapt to any situation.
Gamefeel, UI:
The game was built on Touch Video, Flavourwork's custom engine, everything is built from video files. Through the power of the engine my role included giving everything in the world the physics to work. For example, making all of the pages of the rollodex respond to gravity.
Gamefeel was really tricky in this project, because the medium is live action, players are very quick to notice any oddities or discrepancies with how they'd expect an object to behave. Care had to be taken when playtesting to ensure that everything felt like one would expect. The walls of the magic circle were paper thin.
In addition, I worked on designing and implementing the UI we used to teach players how to interact with the world.
Post-Mortem
What Went Right?
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Designing interactions from planning to implementation was successful.
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UI allowed players to understand some complex interactions.
What Went Wrong?
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UI required a lot of experimentation and tinkering to get right, which cost us valuable time.
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Finding the balance between "movie" and "interactive" in the interactive movie.
What Was Learned?
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Live action games are challenging to sell and keep audiences immersed in.