Pebble Quest
A gentle journey of curiosity, reflection, and the magic of small discoveries
Pebble Quest is a cozy 3D Open World game focused on music and creative exploration. The player has free roam to explore and find pebbles, with each pebble adding a new track to the music. Developed in conjunction with QGOMA, Pebble Quest is a musical experience as much as a game.
Details
Made In
Unity
Publishing On
Itch.io
Team Members
Maeve Chamberlain
(
Programmer, Designer
)
Scarlett Miller
(
Artist, Designer
)
Contributions
My Contributions:
- Optimisation
- Interactables
- UI Development
- Audio Development
- Scene Management
- Source Control
Duration
2 weeks of pre-production
11 weeks of development
Pre-Production
Pre-production began with the project brief given to us by QGOMA who was our industry partner on this project, as well as roleplaying as our fictional client. The brief requested a game to demonstrate, mimic, inherit or bring to life Olafur Eliasson's work, particularly Beauty, Riverbed, and The Cubic Structural Evolution Project. We were explicitly told to do whatever we wanted from the brief, as long as we could justify the relation back to Eliasson's work.
Through this we decided to develop a cutesy open-world game focused on individual experience, beauty, creativity and slowly building to a greater experience. Afterwards, we each started proposing ideas and elements of game design eventuall landing on Pebble Quest, with each pebble having it's own music/instrument that plays once collected, similar to My Singing Monsters.
With the design set, I began working on some tech demos that I could use in the project and to confirm that our game's design would be something we could accomplish in the given timeframe.
Development
During development, I began working on the pebble collection system and the quest system. The pebbles were relatively easy to make a class for, and then setting up a pebble manager. Afterwards I spent my time developing quests, UI and audio management.
Around halfway through development time, we realised that there were too many things for our 3D modeller to model, and we had to begin cutting back on models. The first thing we decided to start cutting was the level areas, which we shrunk each large area into a smaller section of one large area and cutting the cave area we had planned.
Afterwards development went smoothly, finishing the audio and pebble systems, I began working on dialogue and we finished development smoothly.
Reflection
Goals & Scope
Our original game was quite overscoped. We had underestimated the amount of work required to 3d model the environment and as such had to descope. We had descoped quite late but luckily most of our ideas and ideation were able to be shrunken down to a smaller environment, although we did lose some ideas that we wanted to include. I do wish we had the time to fully realise our original design, but I am still quite happy with how it turned out.
Mechanics & Fun
I feel our mechanics, primarily the UI, is lacking a certain polish. Although our playtests came back quite popular, I wish I had spent more time working on UI polish. I felt that the text always felt off-putting, including but not limited to the dialogue and activity text. If I had more time to work on it, I would love to continue refinement and polish.
Process & Timeline
We stuck pretty closely to our original timeline, even with the descoping we managed to fit in our final environment update to the original timeline we had planned. We did not have as much project management sheets and documents as I would have preferred, however with a small team and frequent use of a discord server we were able to achieve similar results.
Team & Player Feedback
The game had very positive reception both from our team and from players. We receieved frequent comments about the gameplay and progression feeling gratifying, about the vibe being immaculately cozy, and the world being interesting to explore. We also received quite positive feedback in regards to internal motivation from players, in which players were motivated by their own desire to progress rather than from our game itself, which was something discussed early in ideation as a possible Player Experience Goal.
One playtester really wanted me to include the pun "Rock Music" somewhere, and it didn't quite fit into the game so here it is.
Pebble Quest was my first game development project with a group that I reflect fondly upon. I really enjoyed making Pebble Quest and the development process in a group. I do think the game does have some issues but I am quite proud of the game overall.
Failures
I believe the game's biggest failure is it's connection to the brief. Although I believe it does embody some of the qualities Olafur Elliason's work, we did not delve deep enough into our research of Olafur Elliason to adequately answer the brief. At our pitch presentation at the end of the semester, we were asked why we didn't model the environment after Icelandic cliffs and rivers, and we didn't have an answer.
Looking back I don't quite regret designing our environment apart from that as I believe Iceland's cliffs and rivers don't quite fit the style of the rest of the game. However as this was a project for QGOMA as a client, and as such we should've tied the game closer to the brief.