Julia Redden
Game Designer
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Role: Associate Game Designer/Systems Designer
Team Size: ~80
Platform: PC, Playstation 5
Project Snapshot
Five Nights at Freddy's: Secret of the Mimic is a story-rich puzzle horror game where you are Arnold, the hapless Fazbear technician forced to enter an abandoned factory with a hostile, homicidal creature lurking within.
Systems Designer
Wrote multiple design documents for engineering, collaborated with engineers to build tools or necessary elements to implement puzzles/dialog/sequences, and refined those systems based on my own polish notes and those of leadership.
Game Designer
Designed and implemented six sets of at least three conduit puzzles, took responsibility for five and a half levels, and collaborated with engineering to create tools for design that were straightforward to use while maintaining the flexibility for custom and creative sequences.
Conduit Puzzles
System: Conduit Puzzles are meant for restoring power to different areas by aligning conduits to make a complete circuit. Their difficulty increases over time by shortening the time limit for solving the puzzle and/or by having missing pieces that need to be found in the level to start the puzzle.
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Design Goal: To make a flexible puzzling system with easily understood mechanics that could be used multiple times to either kite the player or force them into a stressful situation.
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Details: Every instance of a conduit puzzle in the game has at least three possible iterations, which I designed and tested to make sure that there was no possibility of soft lock. After designing the system, I worked directly with an engineer to make a tool that made it quick and easy for me to make puzzles and put them in their relevant spots.
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What I would change: At the time of writing, Secret of the Mimic just released, so I don't think I have the necessary distance to see the ways the design could be improved beyond polish notes that I would have liked to get to before release.
Crane Game
System: Crane Puzzles were puzzles where the player used a large crane to move large objects that could then be used for as a pathway for the player to traverse.
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Design Goal: To create a flexible puzzle system that could be used multiple times and create more dynamic environments the players could visit and revisit as they gained access to more doors that would allow them to get collectables.
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Details: There are only two crane puzzles in the game, one in the theater backstage and the loading bay. Building the system required working directly with an engineer to build a blueprint that could be used, working directly with a UI engineer to implement a clear top-down representation of the puzzle oh a screen the player could see. After that, I implemented both the existing crane puzzles.
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What I would change: I would have liked to add at least one more crane puzzle. The system we had was very flexible, and I think there was potential for interesting designs that added vertical levels that the player had to work with and more pathways that could be created. However, this was not in scope for the project.
Loading Bay
Level: The Loading Bay is a warehouse with many portions of a parade float that, using the crane system, the player can move around to get to where they need to go. Every parade float piece should have a potentially fatal obstacle for the player to pass.
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Design Goal: To make a variety of float pieces that are fun to traverse as well as fun to puzzle together, and to not make the obstacles so difficult to pass that the player dreads needing to cross the room multiple times.
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Details: I had freedom to create all the obstacles, so I white boxed, blueprinted, and presented the following--two hammering construction automatons, spinning 4th of July sparklers, a chomping alligator, and stomping baby feet.
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What I would change: If I were to design this again with all the time I needed, I would like to try a wider variety of float obstacles. I believe it would be more fun if there were more verticality worked in, such as if the player needed to balance on top of a dipping and spinning ballerina to pass on to another float.
Escape Tunnel
Level: At the end of Act 2, the player has a choice to leave the factory (and get the Bad Ending) or to defy Dispatch and enter a secret passage under the security office (and continue to Act 3).
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Design Goal: To create a sequence where the player can reasonably suspect that Dispatch is deceiving them, and also reasonably not have that suspicion, which feels natural whether they follow instructions or not. Either way, if the player chooses to continue the game, the escape tunnels should feel mysterious, menacing, and dramatically different from other spaces the player has encountered so far.
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Details: There were many custom tweaks that had to be made to the security office for this particular sequence, so to set everything up, I collaborated with two separate engineers and blueprinted/animated some things on my own. While doing this, I white boxed the escape tunnel, keeping it claustrophobic but interesting to walk through while Dispatch taunts the player.
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What I would change: If I were able to, I would like to go back to clean up some of the back end so I could address more polish notes that still bother me.
Note: My work on parachute.exe starts at the beginning of this video, and ends when the player descends under the goodbye show (roughly at 1:45).