Lake Minnewaska
2024
A narrative fishing game where players can explore the secrets of Lake Minnewaska while guiding Sosa on his journey to become a better father. Completed as a capstone project for USC Games Project 2023-2024 academic school year and officially shipped to Steam on June 1, 2024.
Our Goal
“Lake Minnewaska” is an exploration of grief and the various ways to portray them through narrative, environment, and gameplay.
Highlights
A simple rundown of what I worked on in this project.
Role: Technical Designer
Engine: Unity
Team Size: 35
Timeframe: 1 Year
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Facilitated communication between various disciplines, including art and engineering, to reach design goals while managing and assisting fellow designer.
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Designed and polished game systems, including journal, fishing, and map.
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Assisted in rewriting and finalizing narrative flow and connecting narrative to all implemented systems and environment.
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Assisted in the layout and creation of boat and lake zones to ensure environment portrays the narrative and changes accordingly.
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Implemented various elements into Unity, such as fish caught view and journal base and integrated art assets, narrative, and animations into the engine.
Trailer
Challenges
Reeling in the Narrative
One of our first challenges was connecting our core mechanic, fishing, directly to the narrative. Why should players fish in the first place? How does catching a fish advance the story? What makes this action meaningful to the narrative? These were some of the first questions we struggled to answer early on.
At first, we explored ways for the fishing mechanic itself to carry some narrative weight. For example, overfishing could tie into an environmental message, but our story focused on something more personal: a father navigating through his grief. We needed something that felt more intimate and that could connect our characters directly to the game progression. How could fishing serve as a meaningful bridge between our gameplay and narrative?
After many discussions, we took a step back and reframed the question: Why fishing? The simplest answer was that it could be a family tradition, a pastime shared between father and daughter. That became our core. Why would he be fishing now when his daughter is sick? Could guilt or regret be driving him? Maybe fishing was his attempt to make up for lost time. This emotional base helped the connection between our mechanics and story feel natural. But our next challenge quickly became ensuring players understood this message without being too heavy-handed.
Catching Stories, One Entry at a Time
If Sosa is reflecting on memories with his daughter, how do we communicate this to players in a way that sticks? Dialogue alone was not enough since spoken lines were too easy to forget. We needed something persistent that players could return to. That’s where the journal came in.
Instead of a simple progress tracker, the journal became a space for lore. Each fish had its own entry, highlighting its narrative significance to the characters. As Sosa fished, he’d comment on these entries, reinforcing key moments through both text and voice. This approach gave players something to engage with beyond the act of fishing while presenting the story in multiple ways to ensure it stuck.
Important Takeaways
Define Your Game and Audience
A clear game vision is everything. Every mechanic should align with your core message. If not, they can risk confusing players and distracting from the intended experience. Also, knowing your audience is essential. Who are you designing for? How will they engage with your game? If your choices don’t serve your intended players, the project can very quickly lose focus and become overly ambitious.
Don’t Be Afraid to Cut or Pivot
Throughout development, we explored a huge variety of gameplay ideas and systems. But at one point, we had to step back and begin to cut anything that didn’t align with our goals or fit within our existing infrastructure. With only a year to develop the game, being decisive about what stayed and what got scrapped was crucial.
Communication is Everything
Keeping an up-to-date design document was critical, especially early-on. That way everyone could stay aligned despite rapid changes. As the head designer, constant communication across disciplines became even more important as the project neared completion. Regular check-ins, answering questions, and making sure everyone was on the same page helped the team work efficiently and avoid last-minute surprises.
Understand Your Infrastructure
When making changes late in production, it’s important to understand exactly what your existing infrastructure and systems can handle. Designing something that requires major engineering work only a couple months before launch just isn’t realistic. Instead, being creative within the constraints of your systems and finding manageable solutions that limit work while fixing issues need to be the focus.