Pixie Dust is a 2.5D Platformer where the player uses static electricity to teleport around obstacles, and dust to fight off a variety of common household pests. You play as Leena, who is a tiny magical being known as a Dust Pixie; one of the invisible unsung heroes that protect human homes from the dusty dangers in our walls and floorboards. Once a Dust Pixie finds a home, it's theirs to protect for life. Inspired by stories such as The Littles and The Secret World of Arietty, Pixie Dust hopes to deliver a fun, casual platforming experience with a compelling world and light story elements. 

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My Specific Contributions Included...

• Rapid prototyping

• Playtesting

• Early 2D level designer, and later on, 3D Level Design requirements 

• Combat design

• Enemy AI design

• UI Design

• Production and Design Leadership responsibilities

• Some sound design

 

I worked on this game over the course of two semesters, working chiefly in design and production roles. Just before the start of fall semester in September 2015, I was hired onto team Troublemaker by Pyeongguk Lee and Euntaek Park, who were looking for a designer to work with for their final year. They wanted to work on a platformer with alternative movement mechanics, and showed me a few games for reference to help communicate this. I brainstormed some ideas from this information and eventually came up with the basics for the teleport beam. 

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We spent our first semester getting the core mechanics in a playable state. I did a lot of level iteration during this time, not for the purposes of making final content, but for exploring different ways we could use the mechanics we had, and making sure we didn't need other mechanics to make the platforming fun.

As a team we were indecisive about whether to make our game 2.5D or 3D; both offered interesting challenges, but our resources were limited as a small team of seniors who were trying to graduate. Plenty of level iteration with tons of playtesting were needed from my end to finally inform our decision.

As producer, I also began talking to artists and sound designers I knew to see if they'd be interested on working on the project. Close to the semester's end, we got lucky and scored a total of 3 artists, who worked on concepts for spring semester as we finished up our fall submission. 

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Then, the unexpected happened over winter break: I landed an internship. In spite of my best efforts I could not find ways to stay with the team for credit and do the internship. I did not want to abandon my team, especially since we only had just hired our artists, so I hired additional team members to take my place and stayed on as a design lead and producer. For the duration of spring semester, I primarily was around to set design requirements and manage the team's content creation tasks. When I could spare the time, I would assist with debugging our C# code and adjusting enemy placement in our level designs.

 

My schedule was kind of overloaded as a result, but after all the work I spent in fall semester, I really wanted to see the game succeed. Unfortunately, pushing myself that far had some severe drawbacks to my physical and mental health.  I was happy to have another completed game under my belt, but I also learned some very valuable lessons on work-life balance and when to ask for help. The management experience was also useful to have in mind in case I ever decide to start my own company, but before I ever consider something like that I want more experience (and less student debt). 

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