Michael Diaz

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Caesura, a Music-Based Narrative Game

Time spent developing: 6 months (Ongoing)
Team size: 21 members
Engine: UE5
Roles: Design Lead

Caesura is a story driven action-adventure game told through the eyes of Lyra, a naive but otherwise hopeful teen who has unwittingly unleashed an silencing curse on her homeland. Armed with only an heirloom instrument and hope, she'll need to bring sound back into the envrionment and confront mistakes from the past in order to save her home and loved ones.

As design lead I proposed the initial concept for Caesura, where a hero uses music to navigate a bleak and unforgiving world. Over time the narrative has evolved into a story of overcoming self-doubt in order to realize one's true potential. During the early stages of development I created rapid prototypes of core mechanics in unity as a proof of concept, including the game's core mechanic. The "sway", as it is titled, is meant to emulate the action of bowing a violin to make music, using the analog nature of a controller's triggers to mimic the back-and-forward movement of the bow. Throughout development I have held meetings both with my design team and with other disciplines to ensure the game adhered to the core pillars of nature, music, and healing, giving me a better understanding of discipline-specific pipelines and strengthening connections throughout the team. The nature of our healing design pillar has brought up interesting challenges and solutions alike, such as our method of designing a method of combat where the player is only capable of healing the enemy; the solution I conceputalized has the player un-corrupt enemies and guide them to safety as they attempt to heal key dying objects in the arena.

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A Slime's Knightmare, a Speedy, Fast-Paced Puzzle-Platformer

Time spent developing: 2 weeks
Team size: 5 members
Engine: Unity 3D
Roles: Technical Designer, Producer

A Slime's Knightmare is a puzzle platforming game where players must build and climb their way to freedom as a dungeon slime. As they ascend, they are chased by the vengeful ghost of a knight they've slain, requiring them to rapidly assemble their escape from various rooms in the ever-rising fog.

As a technical designer, I scripted the isometric movement system for the character controller, and integrated in-engine animations for the slime's model, allowing our team's animator to focus on rigging and animating the imposing knight model. Additionally, I created a in-engine audio handler to easily add and make calls to the various BGM and SFX used in the project. After most of the core features were complete, I aided in materials and shader work by creating the fog, knight material and flame effects for certain rooms Throughout the duration of development, I also served as a producer, creating a gantt chart of desired features and using trello to ensure the team stayed on track for our final deliverable, making adjustments as needed.

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Purebread Purrsuit, a Whimsical Endless Runner

Time spent developing: 2 weeks
Team size: 5 members
Engine: Unity 3D
Roles: Technical Designer, Producer

Purebread Purrsuit is an endless runner where players navigate their way through an infinite bakery as a freshly baked loaf of cat. As the run, they must avoid haphazardly thrown knives and rolling pins, all while collecting loose dough to purchase new skins and boost their high score.

As a technical designer, I focused primarily on the procedural generation of the game. I began with creating base tiles and populating them with assets that would dictate the bounds that the player could move in, and then setting up a basic algorithm that would generate turns depending on the current room the player was in. Once the path would generate properly, I then added in random obstacles in the form on the knife and rolling pin assets from our artists; I animated these using the physics system in Unity, combined with kinematics to ensure the knife would land in the ground point-down without fail. After core features were done, I assembled the in-game UI to fit the theme of a simple bakery, scaling it to fit mobile devices. For the main menu, I opted for a more diagetic UI where the character selection was integrated into the scene through camera work. Towards the end of the project, I specialized in features geared towards production value, such as the camera screen shake when getting hit by an obstacle and the smooth camera movement to guide the player through turns. I also took on a producer role, directing the team on which tasks to prioritize and heading design meetings, ensuring our core features adhered to the mobile game consumer market and were ready to demo.

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Intruder, a Short Thriller Story

Time spent developing: 2 weeks
Team size: 5 members
Engine: Unity 3D
Roles: Technical Designer, Narrative Co-Writer

Intruder is a short thriller-narrative game where players take the role of a newly-divorced mother putting her child to bed after a long day. However, recent events may have more significance than desired as she finds more and more things awry in her home. Was that lamp always on?

As a technical designer I built upon an existing first person character controller to allow the player to interact with and hold/move various items in their environment. Given the narrative-heavy nature of this project, I took the time to develop a tool to create triggerable event sequences that would mirror the narrative beats we had planned out. As a narrative writer, I worked with another member to create the overarching narrative, following a traditional 3-act structure. Over time, we honed in on specific plot points that I would then reference to create in-game dialogue within the engine. Additionally, I would integrate the custom assets and animations from our artists, ensuring they were working properly and scripted with any necessary functionality.

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Castellations, a Roguelite Tower Defense/Visual Novel Hybrid

Time spent developing: 6 weeks
Team size: 2 members
Engine: Unity 3D
Roles: Technical Designer

Castellations is a combination tower-defense and visual-novel hybrid where the player takes the role of a elderly astrologer-wizard with a botched immortality spell. Rather than living forever, every time the wizard would die, they are sent back to the location where the spell was first cast, and reverted to their state back then. The only way for them to end this cycle is to track down a meteor that has crashed on the other side of the continent and use its magic to fix the spell. But the journey is dangerous, and to survive they'll have to bargain with friend and foe alike.

As a technical designer, I conceptualized the idea for a roguelite with a persistent world in the form of a reputation system across the various towns and cities the player comes across, and the factions that occupy them. In order solve the issues of tracking the player's interactions and giving the player "quests" that allowed them to gain powerful advantages in their runs, I developed a script that acted like a compiler for a csv file of dialogue. The script breaks down a line of dialogue into a set of enumerations and is parsed into a string of different function calls depending on which dialogue options the player chooses. Additionally, I worked on the diagetic portions of the UI, such as having the tower physically move across a map of locations, hiding and revealing object plains depending on the game state, and an artificial skybox with constellations that would rotate and change during gameplay- providing different buffs and debuffs to the combat and dialogue systems

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Spectral Sleuth, a VR Dark Ride Pre-Visualization

Time spent developing: 4 months
Team size: 15 members
Engine: UE5
Roles: Design Lead, Director of Development

Spectral Sleuth is a VR puzzle game where players must help a forgetful ghost remember details about their life in order to move on into the afterlife. The game itself is created to serve a as proof-of-concept in integrating live Large Language Model AIs into a dark ride setting.

As design lead, I began by examining multiple dark rides at various amusement parks in order to gain an understanding of traditional dark ride layouts and how their experiences are presented to rider. The next step was to identify the various ways interactions could occur between the player, the AI, and the environment, and design short "minigames" that slowly increased the intamacy of interactions between the three elements. Once the core game loop was established, I worked with level designers on our team to create and iterate on a track styled to look like the interior of a victorian manor. Additionally, I worked with programmers to create blueprint tools that could be placed anywhere within the level to affect the cart in a variety of ways, from altering cart speed, to making the cart spin when needed.

As director of design, I consolidated the various design decisions into a miro board made available to the entire team for ease of reference. This board included reference images, visualized game loops, external asset lists, and answers-at-a-glance to common design questions from other disciplines. In order to ensure our team met every deadline, I created a gantt chart of necessary features and held weekly standups in order to measure and account for the velocities of each member. Tasks were also managed through trello to track dependencies and mark the gradual completion of features.