Beaver Quest is a casual puzzle game that invites players into a vibrant woodland world ravaged by the evil tree. Players take on the role of a brave beaver on a mission to rebuild all of the lost dams. By strategically moving cubes and constructing dams, the player solves increasingly complex environmental puzzles.
Game Screenshots
Beaver Quest
Level Designer | 5-Person Team | 4 Month Development
As a level designer, my responsibilites included…
Designed three gameplay levels over a five-month production cycle, balancing puzzle progression and core mechanics.
Collaborated closely with a small team of developers to iterate mechanics and affordances.
Created product backlog with sticky notes to properly scope our projects milestones and features
Contributed to production efforts by coordinating development pipelines and delivery of milestone builds to stakeholders.
Design Tools I Used During This Project
Unity
Confluence
Perforce
Miro
Microsoft Office Suite
Slack
OBS
Steamworks
Example Documents
Beaver Quest Portfolio
I created a document detailing the levels I designed, along with the guiding philosophies and mechanics behind each one. It also includes a team postmortem that reflects on the development process that highlighting what went well, what challenges we faced, and key “even better ifs” that outline opportunities for improvement moving forward.
Beaver Quest Pitch Presentation
This presentation was constructed and complied by my team. This presentation was provided to stakeholders during Pre-production to pitch our initial game concept.
Postmortem on Beaver Quest
This game project was my first oppurtunity to become a level designer and see what designers experience throughout production. I believe it is important that as producers we understand and have a level of empthay for the developers, and having the chance to be a developer myself allowed me to learn a few things…
Communication: Over the course of the development cycle communication was a top priority and allowed me to always understand what my teammates goals and ideas were and adjust my own goals and ideas accordingly. Properly communicating also helped with overall team cohesion and by the end of the project I feel like I had made good friends and would love to work with my teammates in the future.
Iteration: There were constant reviews with our stakeholder early in the design of my levels and this process really helped me make interesting and complex puzzles within my level. Iteration also allowed me to not feel attached to any part of my levels and helped me make decisions that would be best for the game rather than my personal feelings about the levels I made.
Time Management: As a team this answer slightly changes, but when it comes to a personal level, I feel like I was very good at staying and completing tasks on time and with a quality that I was confident with. I did not feel like there was a need for my tasks to be crunched and this made me freely available to help where needed.
Unity: I learned a lot more about the tools needed for game development and how to use them more effectively. Over the course of the development process, while not mastered by any means, I feel like I became familiar with Unity to the point where I can become more self-reliant.
Communication Part 2: While mentioned in what went well section, there is something I wanted to call out that was an invaluable learning experience, that is working with people that don’t share similar backgrounds. As my whole group was from a different country and has a different native language, there was an obvious learning curve that required me to figure out how to properly convey what my goals and ideas where, but also figure out how best to listen to my teammate’s goals and ideas.
Stay Flexible: While I always have maintained a “go with the flow” mentality, nothing could really prepare me for the true expect the unexpected nature of game development. While daunting and stressful at times, it was fun to learn how to navigate the random and sometimes funny problems that pop up and need to be fixed. These issues challenge one’s critical thinking skills in a variety of ways, and learning how to solve those problems has been valuable. I am looking forward to many more years of being stumped and learning how to solve many, many more problems.