© Benjamin Emdon 2021-2024
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Next Day Delivery
Next Day Delivery was developed by the Cluck Collective, a 12 person indie studio formed of students during my first year at university. The team was made up of 3 programmers, 3 Designers, 2 Environment artists, 2 Artists, 1 Writer and 1 Audio Designer.
The game was made in Unity in a 5 month development cycle. The team utilised Agile Development and Git Version Control to assist with developing the game.
I was a designer, primarily working on Level Design, Narrative Design and QA Testing.
The game was voted best game from our year by the student cohort.
Game Concept
Next Day Delivery is a 3D first person stealth thriller. After accidentally falling into a secret warehouse at Condo Incorporated while contracted to fix a smart elevator, the player must find a way to escape without their employer finding out or risk being terminated (literally).
Carefully sneak through the warehouse, avoiding the office “compliance” drones. If caught the player will be terminated.
Use your wits to solve puzzles in order to progress forwards or deal with obstacles in your path. Throw fire extinguishers to distract drones or push crates on top of them to destroy them.
Explore the warehouse and uncover a dark narrative imbued into the level via environmental story telling.
Hack various computer terminals via a rhythm based hacking mini game to open locked doors or manipulate equipment to help solve puzzles.
Graphic Design by Lyra Shillabeer
Core Game Design Principles
Next Day Delivery hosts a thrilling narrative and is a game which is intended to make the player feel uneasy and question the environment they are in, while still containing fun mechanics and gameplay.
A key element of our game is the threatening environment. To build upon this, a core design pillar is to limit the player’s tools in the game. For example, the player is not able to directly fight the drones, break anything physically or move quickly in a meaningful way (e.g. the player can not jump or dash). With less power, the more the player has to think before approaching puzzles and the more the player will feel vulnerable, building into that thriller element of the narrative.
Furthering this, we leaned into encouraging the player to use their wits to progress; Maybe the player can’t attack the drone that is blocking the door, but if you carefully sneak to the upper floor and push a crate off the balcony you can take care of it that way. Opposing movement limitations such as not being able to jump, we do allow the player to perform actions such as crouching and peaking around corners to assist in utilising a stealth-based playstyle.
We wanted to create an experience which displays dark political themes, but at no point pushes the player to act on those. For this reason we chose to tell all of the story through the environment, or events happening passively around the player, rather than through a narrative directly involving them or calling on their action. For example, the environment contains many posters and signs indicating an abused workforce, but it is completely up to the player how those are interpreted and the actions they take upon seeing them.
My Contribution
Level Design
One of my responsibilities on this project was to design levels for the game. I collaborated with Lyra Shillabeer to plan the first 2 levels of the game. I used Adobe Illustrator to draft design sketches and we later used Unity Pro-builder to block out the levels for prototyping.
Level 2A is the first level of the game and the only level in the current build.(If you were curious level 1A was planned to be a prologue). While the level structure was initially concepted by Lyra Shillabeer, it was a collaborative effort to bring the level to completion. We frequently communicated about the direction of the level design and each contributed to different rooms within it. I was mainly responsible for the design of the large room shown below.
The first section of the level is designed to guide the player through the core systems of the game. In the first room, the player can not get through until they have pushed a crate and hacked a terminal to open a door, the next room they must sneak past a drone, and in the room after they are introduced to the first puzzle.
At the climax of the level is a large segment which encourages the player to test what they have learned. As shown in the design below, in this section the player will have to utilise hacking, stealth and puzzle solving to get through.
While not a straight up tutorial, this level was designed to teach the player the games core mechanics in an order which makes sense. Starting with base actions such as pushing objects, moving towards stealth which introduces risk and then onto puzzles which requires the knowledge of previously used mechanics to overcome.
Level segment designed by Benjamin Emdon.
A plan for how level 2A will flow, including details of each rooms’ Context, Gameplay features and Narrative elements explored. Click the image to enlarge.
An initial design for level 2B by Benjamin Emdon
Narrative Design
Collaborating with other designers and the teams’ writer Kieran Robson, my role was primarily in linking level design to the story of the game, planning where narrative elements would be presented to the player and how they would be displayed.
In level 2A the player is witness to the extreme measures taken by Condo to enforce security and productivity in the warehouse. The level is littered with posters hinting at unfair working conditions and the player is introduced to the armed security drones that shoot on sight. It was planned that this level would also contain the rooms in which the drones are produced and stored, further showcasing the lengths Condo take to control their facilities.
Level 2B is what would have been the next level in the game. While level 2A was an introduction to the security at Condo, 2B was intended to be an expansion on this theme, presenting how the tight security affects the staff in the facility.
For this reason we chose to centre this level around a staff break room, the idea was for it to act as a clear example of how the company’s dubious practices affect the workers. For example, in this room we can show food rations available to workers and showcase the methods the company use to limit break time using armed drones seen in the previous level.
This is also incorporated into gameplay, the goal of the level is to open a door which is in the break room. But in order to go in and out of the break room, the player must hack and manipulate the time settings in the drones guarding the doors to set the time to break time, the one time of the day when they move away from guarding the doors.
As a key part of the writing team, I engaged in narrative discussion and contributed to the direction of the games story and plot.
QA Testing
I was a key internal QA tester for Next Day Delivery. Every time a new system was implemented I would open the Unity project and test it. Afterwards I would write up all of the bugs I found to the teams bug board and notify the programmers if anything required an urgent fix.
Towards the latter end of development, I began handing out builds to others outside of the team such as students and friends to gather back general feedback about the game as well as document any more bugs. This helped the team avoid many game breaking bugs and flaws in the games level design. For example, the games hacking minigame UI was updated to cater towards dyslexic members of our audience, after I discovered in playtesting with a friend that he could not understand the minigame.
Bugs were categorised into 4 main categories:
S – bugs which causes the game to be completely unplayable
A – bugs which allows the player to become stuck, softlock themselves or become unable to access a feature of the game.
B – bugs which make the game a less pleasurable experience for the player.
C – bugs which hold little significance to the player, but still obviously a mistake in the games features or representation.
