General 4 — John R Adams | Game | Designer

Wolf Packtics

Overview

“Zenko: A Fox's Tale” is an Action-Adventure 3D Platformer for the PC. Zenko is a young fox that will journey across a long-abandoned mountain settlement to capture its wayward guardian spirits to restore an ancient shrine using the power to swap between realms.

Final Gameplay Trailer

Studio: Wolf Packtics

Type: Team Project

Team Size: 17

Development: November 2020 - August 2021

Ownership: Menu System and Menu Functionality and the Tutorial System and Functionality.

Responsibilities: Prototyped and developed the final menu system used for game release. Designed the UMG widgets for the game, and programming the functionality of the menus. Prototyped and designed the Bonus Content widget and programmed its functionality. Designed the Tutorial Volumes and developed Tutorial portions of the level.

Tools used: Unreal Engine 4, Blueprints, Lucidchart, PowerPoint

Steam Link: Go to Steam Page

Zenko: A Fox’s Tale Main Logo

Spatial Menu System

To make the menu system for Zenko: A Fox’s Tale unique, it was decided by the Lead Designer with collaboration and support from the Technical Design Team that a spatial menu system highlighting our team’s expertise in both level and technical design was the best route. For this project I provided the following:

Prototyped Spatial Menu and Menu System Mechanics
Designed Menu Widgets & Menu Button Class
Programmed menu functionality for Main Menu, Options Menu, Video Menu, Audio Menu, Controls Menu, Extras Menu, Level Select Menu, and Bonus Content Menu
Prototyped and designed Bonus Content Widget to allow bonus content to be viewed in a widget flipbook and to have a table of content also

Spatial Menu Prototype

Technical Game Design is an iterative process that requires brainstorming, conceptualization, and prototyping. An irritative process was used to create the user experience features such as the main menu, options, extras, and credits menu for a game. For a game, it cannot just be a simple menu system, the menu system itself must be an experience and relate to the narrative and concept of the game.

Bonus Content Widget Prototype & Final Design

Bonus Content Widget Prototype

This is the first prototype of the Bonus Content widget that I developed and created for Zenko: A Fox’s Tale. In this first iteration, I used a carousel widget and modified it in the UMG UI Designer with blueprint logic that pushes the carousel forward on each image. This first prototype demonstrated that the concept was possible, but had to be refined to make more efficient and effective.

Final Bonus Content Widget Design

The final Bonus Content widget was modified to use a Texture 2D array to store the concept art images inside. Next, a Table of Contents is added to the side to allow the player to instantly go to the image. Finally, each image had to be specially cropped to fit within measurements of the widget. The Previous, Next, and Back button keep their same functionality from the first iteration.

First Prototype Bonus Content Functionality

This was the first iteration of programming logic to get the first prototype of the Bonus Content Widget. This function allowed the Previous and Next button to scroll back and forth within the Carousel widget to create the effect of scrolling through the bonus content.

Final Prototype Bonus Content Functionality

The Final Prototype Bonus Content Widget uses a 2D Texture array to store the images. This allows the bonus content to be iterated through via increment operators and set instantly instead of being scrolled through like in the first iteration.

Tutorial Volumes & Level

To aid players in learning how to play Zenko: A Fox’s Tale, Tutorial Volumes were created that would display a tutorial text to the screen when the player overlapped with the volume. This system allows a seamless integration of the tutorial system without taking away from gameplay.