Ben Fellows
Cardboard Chronicles
A puzzle adventure all about thinking inside the box. In a world entirely of cardboard and drawings, you are the one who created it all. A child with nothing else to play with but some boxes and crayons gets sucked into their world and becomes a doodle themselves! Smash and fling your way through puzzles as you help the strange characters you meet on the way to freeing yourself in Cardboard Chronicles!
Roles: Producer, Designer, Sound Designer
Engine: Unreal
Team Size: 13
Production Dates: September 2023 - April 2024
Releasing on: Nintendo Switch and Steam
As the producer...
(Yes, you can pet the dog)
I led a team of 13 graduate students in developing our thesis game over 2 semesters. I conducted standups twice a week with our team and managed our Jira with my co-producer. Throughout our two week sprints, I made sure everyone had and understood their assigned tasks. We regularly updated these tasks as progress was made to ensure we remained within scope. This being a school project, this was especially prevalent. There's no asking the publisher for an extension when the semester is about to end.
A huge hurdle to overcome was the challenge of publishing to the Nintendo Switch. Our University had been able to work with Nintendo to obtain Switch dev kits which was a first time thing for everyone. This didn't happen until the second semester though, which meant all the games currently being made in Unreal 5 had to be completely rebuilt in Unreal 4 to even function on the Switch. We weren't sure what all the port was going to take during the first semester so we made sure to scope things down as much as we could while still making a fun experience. These restrictions ultimately led to a lot of innovation in how the game would be played and kept us on our toes as producers.
As always, I took on the role of collecting everyone's progress updates every two weeks and turned them into sprint review presentations I'd give to the class. This was always done as Sir Lancelottacardboard in full cardboard armor. This served not only to present progress to our professors but also as a great way of keeping up with the work everyone on the team was doing.
As the designer...
I was on the initial prototype team of 6 as the lead designer. We had the loose idea of a kid in a cardboard world but we needed to figure out what the fun was going to be. I designed two main game modes we were going to develop in our prototyping phase. The first was a rhythm game where you slapped enemies to the beat. Your character completely flattens themself when they attack so you'd also be dodging while attacking other enemies. It was meant to be a more dynamic type of rhythm game along the lines of Crypt of the Necrodancer. I still think it has potential but with the time we had, it would take far too long to develop and we decided to scrap it when we moved into full production.
The other idea I had pitched was more of a Bloons meets whack-a-mole type game where the enemies would scatter amongst the level on set paths and you'd have to run them down flattening them as you go. It wasn't something designed to be incredibly difficult, but it was really fun slamming things along the way. This would turn into our main form of combat in our full version. We did abandon the set paths and transition to enemy AI that would follow and attack the player but the core slapping mechanic remained and really came to frame our entire game moving forward.
As the sound designer...
I wrote all the music in the game which included a town theme that I also used for the library and farm with different instruments along with a battle theme that also has a more dramatic version in the boss fight. All of these tracks are designed to loop into themselves.
I also found or made most of our various sound effects through the mixings of different sounds along with doing foley work to create our most important sounds. This involved slapping cardboard with various mallets and rubbing pieces together along with various types of cymbal hits to find the perfect sounds.
A particularly unique challenge I had to solve was how we wanted our dialogue boxes to sound. We decided early on that we wanted to do something similar to the boops of Animal Crossing and Celeste. I invested in a set of Boomwhackers which sounded remarkably like cardboard tubes and we turned these into our town's unique way of speaking!
