Chaos Rises as Moth Man Breaks Loose!
In Moth Mania, a disgruntled researcher trying to save himself from certain death by Moth Man’s hand sets off on a quest to return his kidnapped young, the Mothletts. You will collect these Mothletts from various areas of a secret government facility using the experimental M.O.T.H.A.M. Gear to see in darkness and use its lights to guide the cryptid’s young in this Puzzle Platforming adventure. With the ability to harness the power of light and darkness and hundreds of monsters on the loose, many puzzling challenges await as players experiment and explore this tense world. With the lives of every employee at the facility at stake, you must return the Mothletts to safety before Mothman can wreak more havoc.
Role:
Game Director
Duration:
9/2025 - 4/2026
Tools:
Unity, C#, Perforce, Figma, Confluence
Game Design
Preproduction & Alpha Development
Into the Unknown
As part of ArtCenter College of Design's curriculum, all students work on a Capstone project. The project is a culmination of a student's education and time at the institution. Going into my Capstone, I was chosen to be a director for a project, my first time leading a team of this size.
Development began with a team of 7 students, 3 Game Designers and 4 Artists. Driecting was untreaded waters for me, but the first major task was to come up with the concept for the game. As a team we ran though hundreds of bad ideas, but quickly settled on three concepts we wanted to work with:
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Retro Game Feel: We wanted the game to be small in scope and emulate the feeling of NES & SNES era games
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Pick-Up and Play: We also wanted the game to be small in scope, with players able to quickly pick up the game and play 1-2 levels in a single sitting.
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Cryptid/Monster Theme: We wanted to choose a unique style for the game, one that hadn't been seen in previous capstones. We eventually determined we wanted to draw influence from media like Gravity Falls and Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorperated.
The Mania Begins
With those early ideas in mind, the team began discussing the idea of making a game where you guided Moth Man through puzzles using light. We liked the idea but felt it needed more meat, with refinement I created the following pitch:
The pitch was simple:
We wanted to make a 2D puzzle platforming game where the player would explore a dark laboratory and use two states to guide Moth Man's babies, the "Mothletts"
Preproduction - Design Documentation
The team and producers enjoyed the gameplay idea. The interaction was simple and introduced many fun puzzle opportunities. We began exploring the idea by creating a thorough Game Design Document. In this document we would explore various area of the game's design, but the earliest decisions came to the Design Pillars (Shown to the Left) and Ideal Player Experience
Game Design Pillars
While the Design Pillars came to us as we fleshed out the project, the Ideal Player Experience was slightly difficult to define. With a gameplay system this strange, and an even stranger objective it was had for me as the director to lay out a consistent experience pitch for the project. Fortunately with feedback from instructor, David Mullick, we settled on this description:
"We want players in Moth Mania to feel a mixture of unease and intrigue as they navigate the game world and collect Mothletts. The game is all about problem solving and exploration and we want to build gameplay that supports that."
For a majority of Fall 2025, the Moth Mania team worked on the design document. We explored as many areas of the game as we could, fleshing them out and making sure they were aligned with our player experience goals.
Dual State Toggling
Mothlett Guidance System
Mothlett Behavior Chart
Dual State Toggling
By the end of Fall 2025 we had completed a full design document and alongside it's completion also began work on a Demo in Unity as well as recruitment for the Spring. To the Right is a recording of this early Demo, and below is the original pitch video:
Evolution & Growth: The Road to Alpha
By the End of Fall 2025, development on Moth Mania was in full swing. The team had grown in size to about 16 students, with new Artists and Game Designers coming to the project. With all of this freshness, there was an issue brewing under the surface of Moth Mania. It was a design issue that would plague the game during the development of the Alpha, a lack of focus on our core mechanics.
As mentioned previously, during the early phases of the project we struggled to define the player experience. This struggle to define proved problematic once we started developing in-engine. We developed the initial prototype and tested it to horrible results. Players were confused, lost, they had no clue how to progress. Our lack of confidence in our core mechanic was felt by our players as we spread our design too thin with varied objects and enemies. The game felt more like Super Mario Bros. 2 than Moth Mania!
This issue was not easy to solve, as it encompassed so much more than level design. This was a fundemental issue with how we built the game and it's mechanics, fortunately the capstone instructors provided fantastic feedback that helped us develop a plan out of this.
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Revise Level Content to place more focus on Dual State & Mothlett Guidance Systems.
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Cut the number of objects in the prototype, refocus on a select few that directly support core mechanics.
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Adjust communication & metrics of the core mechanics to make them more appealing.
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And lastly... PLAYTEST CONSTANTLY
Here is a snippet of the comprehensive notes we had taken after one of Alpha Playtest. These tests were our way of identifying these issues and using player behavior to guide our proposed solutions to the design issues we were facing.
The Mania's End - Beta Completion
Using our playtest data and findings we refined our gameplay loop to be more in line with expectations. While it was sad to cut content, in the end it was a good call to shift our design focus and stabilize our player experience. By the end of Spring 2026, we had completed a simple 15 Minute Vertical Slice of the game.
Below is gameplay of the finished project: