Ripple Cove is an educational game I helped create during my internship at Octopus 8 Studios. It is not yet released due to technical issues that arose after the internship finished.
The player takes the role of a new journalist based on the island of Ripple Cove, working to create ‘information articles’.
Ripple Cove was commissioned by Brunel University to educate students about plagiarism. I worked as a designer in a team with four other interns (an artist, a producer, a programmer and a second designer) and together we took the project from the initial concept phase to a finished product.
I worked with the producer and the other designer to plan the games narrative, gameplay mechanics and internal systems. In addition, my strong programming background allowed me to help with (1) communicating the game systems to the programmer and (2) formatting the text and numeric data in Excel to make them easy to transfer into the game.
I was responsible for the majority of the games numeric design. I needed to create systems to determine how the players actions would affect internal values based on both the specific character and which faction they belonged to. I also took the major part in setting up the spreadsheet that handled both the dialogue and it’s associated numbers, as well as making them easily editable for the producer and other designer. In addition to this I also wrote the descriptions for the games characters and some additional in game lore.
