Adventures Inc.
Fame, fortune... goblin business ethics? Welcome to Adventures Inc. a casual puzzle-adventure game where you run a cutthroat talent agency connecting would-be heroes to grand adventures.
Set in the fantasy kingdom of Woodley Hollow, Adventures Inc. is a punchy satire of the Hollywood culture of reaching fame at all costs. The game puts you in control of a Hollywood-esque talent agency for adventurers where your (literal) job is to shape the careers and epic stories of an eclectic cast of aspiring heroes. Elevate them to celebrity status, consign them to obscurity, or careen their careers off a cliff to boost your bottom line. Your choices will determine their fates and the success of your agency.
Summary: Adventures Inc. uses player choices and character management to actively change the game's narrative. Imagine a fusion of Choose Your Own Adventure and Mad Libs turned into a game. Interview and scrutinize an eclectic cast of would-be heroes through dialogue and diegetic UIs, and then form a team of three to send off on career-altering adventures. This vertical slice of our game features an early adventure to play through, fully voiced NPCs, six of which are ready to be interrogated interviewed, and 18 unique adventure outcomes to see.
Role: Game Design, Game Development
Outcome: Vertical slice prototype
Engine: Unreal Engine 5.3
Tools: Unreal Engine 5, Figma, Procreate, Adobe Suite
Team Size: Two
Duration: Two months
Contributions:
Concept and design of core gameplay loop, systems and mechanics
Technical implementation of the interview, dialogue trees, hero selection and outcomes features with UE5 Blueprints
UI conception, design and implementation
Environment blockout and implementation
Problem space:
Starting as a personal project between Jason Ox and myself, which we aimed to complete in two months, we focused on limiting character actions and instead emphasized interactable UI elements. Our concept began around the question: “What if, instead of the heroic knight chosen to go on a grand adventure, the player was the humble squire following behind the scenes and doing the heavy lifting?”
Opportunity space:
Our “What if…” led us to consider shorter moment-to-moment gameplay loops centered around replayability and resource management, allowing players to focus on fostering relationships with NPCs.
We considered several concepts, such as a “PR team managing a disastrous knight” and a “goblin shopkeeper who sells loot lifted from fallen adventurers.”
For the vertical slice, the core idea was to have two phases to gameplay: an active phase with players making decisions involving NPCs and a results phase presenting the consequences of those choices as they affected the world and characters.
Designing Adventures Inc.
Drawing from personal experiences—my role in leading hiring processes and Jason’s expertise in auditioning as an actor—we developed the themes of Adventures Inc., a parody of trying to become famous through Hollywood’s cutthroat talent agencies. Our mechanics center around an active gameplay loop of hiring, interviewing, and scrutinizing characters, with a results phase focusing on the aftermath of adventures and the success or fall of fame-seekers. The narrative of the game followed our mechanics, highlighting the drama and conflict adventuring agencies endure to boost their bottom line despite their heroes.
Gameplay loops:
Early iterations of our gameplay loop drew inspiration from Wordle and Mastermind where each mission lists required stats for success, but heroes’ stats are hidden. Players need to deduce their hero’s qualities through interviews and inspections to form the right party combination.
This approach however conflicted with our game’s design pillars: there should be no wrong answers, yet choices should have consequences. Our intention with these pillars was to create a casual yet engaging gameplay loop while allowing our players to explore the stories of our characters.
We found inspiration in the game Lil’ Guardsman and its simulation of life as a city gatekeeper. Through fortunate connections, we got in touch with the developers, Hilltop Studios, who guided us through our game's development.
This pivot simplified the complexities of our game in favor of the tried-and-true heist framework of brains, face, and getaway. Adventures would similarly have three unique roles, prompting players to choose a hero from the cast who could fulfill the role well, poorly, or not at all.
This approach allowed us to write more nuanced characters and stories without focusing on stats and win conditions.
Paper prototype of one of our earlier puzzle concepts using found boardgame pieces.
UI Design:
Given our game’s puzzle-focused nature and incorporation of interviewing candidates, deduction mechanics and multiple dialogue systems, a functional UI was vital to our ambitions. Due to its importance, I pushed the team towards more diegetic UIs for our game to enhance the immersion of handling the documents the player would need to read. I discovered early on that a loose illustrative style allowed our team to iterate on my designs more quickly and effectively than wireframing in Figma, and this approach worked well alongside our character illustrations.
I created our UI systems by building our finalized Procreate sketches in Figma and then integrated them into Unreal’s UMG UI Designer.
As the developer responsible for building our core features, such as the dialogue system using Unreal’s Blueprints, my priority was to ensure the dialogue systems were functional and accurate to our designs.
Unfortunately, this meant that some UI widgets didn’t receive the visual overhaul I had hoped to implement.
Art Direction:
Down but not beaten, Ethel will need to start her adventuring agency from the ground up—or in this case, from the attic of the local tavern.
Building on my previous success with integrating drawn characters into a 3D environment in Tout Suite, I blocked out the game’s office layout and decorated it using 3D assets and dynamic lighting. The goal was to capture the look and feel of a medieval Paper Mario world, with characters inspired by Cartoon Network shows like Adventure Time and The Amazing World of Gumball.
My concepts for Ethel Madrionolopagus, owner of Adventures Incorporated, award-winning hero agent and gatekeeper to fame and fortune.