Cory in the House DS
Lead Game Designer
Project Description
Cory in the House" is an adventure game where players take on the role of Cory Baxter, a teenager living in The White House with his father Victor. The game's main storyline revolves around Cory's attempt to sell President bobbleheads after winning a toy contest. However, these bobbleheads are seized by The Evil Toymaker, who plans to use them for hypnotic purposes in Washington, D.C. Players must guide Cory on a mission to retrieve the bobbleheads and thwart the hypnotic scheme.
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Tools and Technologies:
Trigger Editor Tool (TET - in-house level design tool)
CodeWarrior, C++ (writing code for collision fixes in levels)
Key Responsibilities
Originally hired on as a junior designer, I became after being put on the project and my first task was re-write the GDD and re-do the pre-production. This delayed the game a month, but we made up the time in production and hit Alpha on the first submission.
Game Design Document - Wrote the Cory in the House GDD and maintained it throughout the course of the project.
Level Design - Watched the show and created levels based on sets from the show, making changes where necessary for gameplay elements.
Dialog Script - Wrote the original scripts with appropriate dialog heads and interaction points to be implemented by the design team.
Mini-games - Created Buzzy the Spy Fly and wrote documentation to support gameplay. Breaking down the core mechanics, obstacles and flow of levels.
Vision Holder - Drive the vision of the game with Disney and Handheld Games’ requirements - Work hands on with Disney producers and internal producers to maintain the vision of the game
Menu Design - Review similar products to ensure the menus flowed similar to other products of the same style.
HUD Design - Placing how the HUD will look and where items would be for easiest access.
Replayability - One of the requests from Disney was to ensure the game would have replay value. This means there would be changes in a second go through of the experience. We went through and designed the game to have hidden elements only obtainable from a second playthrough.
