Tteokbokki’s

kitchen Cat-astrophe

Type: Group

Role: Design Lead, Level Designer, Narrative Designer

Length: 3 months, ended July 2023

Publisher: DigiPen Institute of Technology

Created by four beginner designers and one artist, this top-down, stealth game will deceive you with its cuteness. The protagonist, a piece of Tteokbokki, is on a mission to rescue all her fishcake cats.

In this short experience, the player must explore the world food kitchen and help Tteokbokki rescue her cats without being noticed by the desserts. hide, sprint, and throw distractions to reach her precious pets!

 Game Overview 

UI Screens

Start Screen Designed by Me

Buttons

I wanted to maintain the kitchen theme throughout the entire game, as much as possible. This is why I designed the buttons to resemble spilled food or cookware.

For the non-interactable UI, I used the same font (also my creation) to align with the cute, round theme, but it was more bland.

There were moments in which players were confused about their goal. My solution was to guide the player more directly through UI or animations.

Let’s get

into UX

Though the cutscene outlined the goal, some players preferred to skip it. This led to confusion about what the goal was so I made a drop-down toast label. Once it lifted, it would reveal the main inventory and sprint UI.

Another point at which players needed extra guidance was delivering the fishcake cats to the proper bowl.

There were two bowls, one representing the spilled Tteokbokki dish and the other was the soy sauce delivery bowl.

Due to the level design, I was able to block the entrance to force players to advance and find the soy sauce bowl.

Originally, there was no death animation. However, I felt the player should feel distressed watching Tteokbokki fall over. I added SFX along with a small animation to make her death feel sudden but more impactful.

Exposition

To begin the game, we wanted a short, simple method of conveying the somewhat convoluted exposition. To design this, I drew up a first-pass sketch of the cutscene slides and playtested it until I got a more universal understanding. Then I drew up some digital, color sketches to send to our artist, Emily Yuan to finish.

Here are some of the digital sketches I made and what they became in Emily’s version:

Note that the main ideas of each slide were maintained, but Emily could add her style and change the composition.

This is the kind of relationship we maintained. As design lead, I kept a closer relationship to the artist to communicate what art we needed and how to improve it to suit the needs of the game.

Here is some more UI I designed that was beautified by Emily

A big part of making this game feel good was adding the background music and SFX. This was the first time I was in charge of the sound design of any project and, therefore there is a lot of room for improvement. The Main Level Music becomes repetitive, so I would add more to its score if I were to redo this project.

Audio

Cultural

Insensitivity

Before we were sure of the enemy design, the team was almost in agreement in making our rolling enemy a sushi roll and our turret enemy Onigiri. The problem with that is the region they come from: Tteokbokki, our protagonist comes from Korea while Onigiri and Sushi come from Japan. Due to the history between those countries, my team was about to make a statement they did not intend. After explaining this to my team, I made a couple of quick documents brainstorming ideas for enemy designs from cultures around the world, theming this after a world kitchen.

Reflection

As the first game I’ve ever completed, I grew as a leader while learning about effective teamwork and time management. I had my hands full with multiple tasks at all times. When I wasn’t focused on the fundamental design, I was drawing UI, programming, creating music and sounds, or playtesting. I had my hands in most of the development. This is one of the most cohesive and finished experiences I’ve had the pleasure to work on.