Lake Minnewaska

Lake Minnewaska is a first-person narrative adventure game where you play as Sosa, a fisherman hoping to reconnect with his daughter. Players will cast their line, collect fish species, and explore the mystical lake waters.

Based on the real Lake Minnewaska in Glenwood, Minnesota, players must fight and reel in the correct fish to advance the narrative.

This is a selected Advanced Game Project at USC for the 2023-2024 Academic School year. I am the Creative Director of this game, which is released on Steam.

Here is the link to the Lake Minnewaska website to read the dev blogs and learn more about the team members!

Responsibilities - Creative Director (35 people)

Directing a one-year Advanced Games Project for my MFA thesis project, where players cast their line and join an African-American angler on an emotional journey through mystical waters to reconnect with his daughter

Responsible for creating a healthy, respectful, and effective team culture and process that can meet the project’s goal and complete my original idea by the end of the school year

Leading the team to make design and creative decisions based on playtester feedback so our narrative is communicated clearly and cutting content to meet deadlines

Using my production expertise to mentor and work closely with the producers on all phases of the development cycle, maintenance, and determine resources

Presenting bi-weekly project updates to faculty and industry professionals with resilience to ensure the team and I are driving toward clarity

Team Makeup

1 Creative Director
1 Art Director
1 QA Lead
1 Tech Artist
1 Music Composer
2 UI/UX Designers
2 Game Designers
2 Marketers
3 Narrative Designers
3 Usability Researchers
3 Producers
4 Sound Designers
4 Engineers
7 Artists

Software

The Process

Postmortem

Developing and leading a 35 person project in Lake Minnewaska teaches me the actions I must take to effectively communicate such a complex emotion: grief.

To successfully convey my story and effectively convey grief, I need to make narrative the most critical aspect of the development process. Adding many intricate mechanics does not aid with the experience.

Players will get distracted when I ask them to learn a lot of different procedures. We can determine how many mechanics can intertwine with the narrative if we have more time and resources. A 20-minute experience can not take that liberty. I am going to share some of the discoveries the usability team made.

Narrative is Paramount

Usability playtest sessions from the early stages of development showed that we needed to achieve the experience goal of making players feel curious at the beginning of the game with a grief undertone.

Players focused more on driving the boat in the third person and talking to fishermen in the first person. It took them, on average, 15 minutes to hook a fish. We understood that mechanics were being flushed out, but we did not intend to distract the player from the other mechanics.

I wanted them to care about the story. A month into development, we have yet to see player progress.

I added many features to the game because I was so caught up in making my fishing game feel unique. I wanted players to transition between walking and fishing in the first person and driving the boat in the third person, and that led to many technical challenges that took away from my goal for players to focus on the narrative.

Bait was also implemented at a point of development. I thought a fishing game could only survive with bait. We got rid of what I call eye candy in this situation: third-person camera, driving the boat, and other realistic fishing procedures.

These ideas looked excellent on paper, but they needed to be cut due to our limited time and my goal of projecting grief.

Reactions to Black Fisherman

I am fortunate to have received overwhelmingly positive feedback about Lake Minnewaska and the representation I brought forth. A playtester shared they “loved that Sosa and Rue were explicitly Black” because the game depicted their partner’s culture.

More playtesters picked up that Sosa and Rue are Black through the environment where we have a pick comb on the dashboard and family pictures on the boat cabin walls.

No playtesters are expressing frustration or racism towards the game’s characters. They are enthralled with the story and the game mechanics.

Unrealistic to Fully Convey Grief

Grief can not be explained and or effectively portrayed in a 20-minute experience. Sosa is fishing from the morning through the evening, and he’s experiencing three stages of grief.

This flow may be realistic for some, but the complex emotion is unpredictable. Even in real life, it’s rare to comprehend people experiencing grief within 20 minutes.

I can not expect people to fully immerse themselves in a grieving state. However, telling players to grieve from the beginning might have yielded better results.

Lake Minnewaska’s narrative does not unveil that a character in the game died until the end. During the experience, it is not explicit that Sosa is grieving.

It is a tricky balance in a creative project: make an engaging experience that keeps the audience on their toes or tells them how to feel from the start.

I am a creative person who likes to read between the lines and enjoy interactive experiences that make me think and reevaluate how I express the art’s emotion.

Documentation

Take a look at our team's documentation if you're interested in learning more about our development.

Lake Minnewaska went from concept to being published on Steam with a student team with varied game development experience.