Big Moth 2
Digipen Junior Team Project
System Designer, Level/Environment Designer
About the game
Big Moth 2 is a 3D first-person farming, economy, and management RPG, inspired by Slime Rancher. In the game, players need to catch moths and farm them in the base.
In this project, I worked as a system designer first semester, mainly focusing on breeding systems. In the second semester, I worked as level and environment designer, focused more on the art part of the game.
Breeding System-Design Purpose
In the game, there're qualities of moths, which decides how much they sell. Moths catch from the wild will have a lower quality, so player have to go through the breeding process to interact with game system, instead of just sell the raw material from the game world-moth and skipping breeding.
A problem of this system is how the moth breed- if they breed two moths for a pair, the total amount should be always increasing fast. If they only breed one, the amount will be always decreasing. There is also a ethical question that moths should not mate with their parents& children.
Thus, I set up my mind of making a breeding system that simulates real world breeding gene system- breed a lot at first, and gradually lose productivity in generations if not bringing in new genes from the wild.
Reproduction Score
Every moths in the game has a reproduction score which is high for all in the wilds. This is the score to measure their reproduction activeness.
When two moths are breeding, they will generate kids with a random amount based on their reproduction score (the higher the score is, the more children they will produce.) Their children will be assigned with decreased random reproduction score compared to their parents.
In this process, reproduciton score will be translated into quality, which basically stands for their price. Now, this system will produce around 2-4 children on the first generation, 1-2 on the second, and 1 on the third, 0 on the fourth (still depends on the specific score.) This made a dynamic change in the moth amount and will encourage players go out and catch new moths instead of simply farming in the base.
Gene Tag (Developing)
Other than the reproduction system, I designed a Gene Tag system that had special influence on the moths like Pokemon and real world genes- there are certain gene tags with a lot of restrictions and requirements to trigger (based on the breeding mate's tags). If they had certain special tags randomly selected both, the trait of the tag will show on the moth.
This system aims to add fun while collecting and add more player choices in breeding, instead of just breeding two moths of high quality.
Level & Art
In the second semester, many artists left our team. There was a huge gap of need for level design and arts. Thus, I worked on making levels of Area 1,2,3 in the second semester. Area 1's layout was already finished, so I utilized my skills in cinematics and re-arranged decorations of area 2 and added fog, colorful skyboxes, color grading to make the scene look pretty.
I designed the layout and details of area 2 and 3. In those areas, I used different lighting methods to create different feeling, resulting in a varied artisitic feel of the game.