Blindsight: War of the Wardens
Blindsight: War of the Wardens is a 3D action-adventure game where you play as Iggy, a blind martial artist with echolocation abilities who must retrieve a stolen family heirloom that may bring unintended consequences to the world.
Blindsight was a USC Games Advanced Games Project, and as such was part of a year-long pitch and production cycle with the full support of USC Games. The project is led by creative director Rocco Wu, and is supported by a cross-disciplinary development team of over 70 members. I was involved with the project from May of 2023 until its release at the USC Games Expo the following May. While I have left the project, it continues development with a small team focused on polish.
You can download the game for free on Steam, here!
What I Did
Outlined core-gameplay mechanics like echolocation and player focus mode and oversee implementation and testing.
Acted as primary level designer for the project, taking concepts from sketch to greybox and incorporating team feedback throughout the process.
Curated the overall look-and-feel of the game via frequent meetings with sound designers, writers, tech artists and animators.
Exerpt from the design specification I wrote for the echolocation system.
Marketplace Pt.1) General layout exploration using a white board and props.
Marketplace Pt.2) A more formalized layout reworking the previous ideas in a layout more conducive to gameplay.
Marketplace Pt.3) Updated sketch intended to increase shape-variety in the environment.
Marketplace Pt.4) Finalized sketch taking into account team feedback and adding detail to the intended layout of enemies.
Marketplace Pt.5) A greyboxed scene used for gameplay testing.
Marketplace Pt.6) A fleshed-out marketplace with enemies and set-dressing.
Marketplace Pt.7) Pre-alpha gameplay still
Marketplace Pt.8) Post-alpha gameplay still. Updated shaders and environmental lighting serve to really sell the feeling of blindness and the importance of echolocation.
Marketplace Pt.9) Post-beta marketplace still. Iterative passes on lighting and sound emission sources with the intention of guiding the player. Also attention paid to narrative set pieces.
Yin-Realm Pt.1) Early sketch synthesizing design team ideas.
Yin-Realm Pt.2) Deeper exploration into the layout of the terrain including elevation markers.
Yin-Realm Pt.3) Rapid-iteration greybox created in Maya.
Yin-Realm Pt.4) Further development using Gaia for terrain generation.
Yin-Realm Pt.5) After a round of feedback to our artist, a new layout for the Yin-Realm is delivered.
Yin-Realm Pt.6) The delivery of long-awaited shader updates allows the team to finally start testing planned enemy layouts (as seen above in a photo from a design meeting on the state of the Yin Realm).
Yin-Realm Pt.7) After rigorous testing and iteration, we reach the state of the game at time of release.