Maurice Johnson
Professional Game Designer
OVERVIEW
Morpheme is an educational puzzle shooter prototype that I developed for improving people's vocabulary. I served as the Game Producer and Art Director of the game. It was a prototype / proof of concept made in Unity 4 with a team of game design graduates.
Each stage begins with random alphabetized enemies appearing on the stage. The player allows the enemies to hit a force-field area that will deposit the enemies letter into a word bank. A player can create a word with the size of the word varying in points. The player is allowed to accept or delete letters/words from the word bank. The more words the player spell the more points they will earn and the enemies will increasingly become faster and more difficult.
Morpheme takes place in beyond the cosmos, where the galaxy is being dominated by the letter armada. You step into the pilot seat of a state of the art star-fighter and use its weaponry and your mastery of your world's language to disrupt their hive collective to become the savior of the universe!
GALLERY
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
Production
Morpheme was my concept. Conceptually it started off as a simple 2d shooter for UE4, but I decided to make the prototype in Unity and go 3d instead.
As the Producer of the game, I outsourced the talent and created the development cycle of the prototype which was 6 months.
For this game I used Scrum methodology having daily meetings for the Art, Music, Design Programming teams and a group meeting with the entire team at the end of each week.
Design
Each weekly build went through QA Testing internally through the team and though testing of kids 8-12. Play-testers were asked their age, genders, education levels and platform that they played on. {MAC/PC)
Additionally, we also took other notes into consideration such as disabilities. (Color Blindness, dyslexia, physical abilities) Such feedback influenced and improved our design decisions.
The game has a Free Play mode and a Objective Mode where the player navigates around a space map liberating planets from enemy forces in a story mode.
Additionally, we experimented with the creation of different types of dictionaries that could be loaded into the games memory for use in schools or specific word types training for students.
Art
As Art Director I oversaw the aesthetic of the game as well as designing the art for the custom soundtrack for the game.
Everything from the game was custom and created from scratch to include the music that was produced, sound effects and voice-overs from the various members of my team. I often worked with the voice-over talent writing dialogue and scripting scenarios on the dialogue could add lore to the game by telling stories in game play to a player.
As for the look of the prototype I was inspired by games such as Wipeout and Starfox. I also assisted in the creation of the UI/UX elements, game screens and some modular 3D environment pieces for stages and enemy assets.
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Sound
I had an innovate idea for the game's soundtrack to be fully immersive to the player so that you could tell a novice player from an pro play just by the type of music that was playing in game.
I experimented with the game soundtrack so that as the player gains more points in the game it unlock new music riffs, beats and rhythms. The games music would increasingly become more aggressive as better the player plays while unlocking new parts of the musical score of a stage.
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Even the sound effects from the laser blast of your starfighter would correspond to the game's beat so as you land more fierce combinations by destroying enemies those beats would effectively effect the rhythm of the game.
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