Tipping Point Tavern
Tipping Point Tavern
Tipping Point Tavern
overview
overview
overview
Tipping Point Tavern is a serious game that uses gameplay to educate how addiction can alter the brain.
Tipping Point Tavern is a serious game that uses gameplay to educate how addiction can alter the brain.
Tipping Point Tavern is a serious game that uses gameplay to educate how addiction can alter the brain.
Role
Technical Designer
Narrative/System Designer
Engine
Gamemaker 2
Duration
4 months
Team Size
6 People
Platforms
Tipping Point Tavern is a serious game designed to educate players on how addiction alters brain chemistry and behavior—not through lectures, but through meaningful play.
Quick Impact Highlights
Built flexible dialogue system that allowed writers to input text without technical knowledge → kept localization on schedule.
Designed drinking mechanic with escalating difficulty → reinforced tavern fantasy while maintaining accessibility.
Coordinated team sprints and scope cuts → shipped playable vertical slice on time.
Tipping Point Tavern is a serious game designed to educate players on how addiction alters brain chemistry and behavior—not through lectures, but through meaningful play.
Quick Impact Highlights
Built flexible dialogue system that allowed writers to input text without technical knowledge → kept localization on schedule.
Designed drinking mechanic with escalating difficulty → reinforced tavern fantasy while maintaining accessibility.
Coordinated team sprints and scope cuts → shipped playable vertical slice on time.
Tipping Point Tavern is a serious game designed to educate players on how addiction alters brain chemistry and behavior—not through lectures, but through meaningful play.
Quick Impact Highlights
Built flexible dialogue system that allowed writers to input text without technical knowledge → kept localization on schedule.
Designed drinking mechanic with escalating difficulty → reinforced tavern fantasy while maintaining accessibility.
Coordinated team sprints and scope cuts → shipped playable vertical slice on time.
my roles
my roles
my roles
Technical Designer
Technical Designer
Technical Designer
Dialogue System for Easy Imputation for Designers
Objective: To make a dialogue system that would allow for easy implementation of dialogue and to go back and make changes.
Observed issue: While the narrative outline was done by me, Dialogue translations from Chinese → English arrived late, and the writer wasn’t comfortable with GameMaker 2.
Solution: Built an auto-ID dialogue system where designers only had to input text.
Outcome: Narrative content was implemented smoothly despite late script delivery.
Dialogue System for Easy Imputation for Designers
Objective: To make a dialogue system that would allow for easy implementation of dialogue and to go back and make changes.
Observed issue: While the narrative outline was done by me, Dialogue translations from Chinese → English arrived late, and the writer wasn’t comfortable with GameMaker 2.
Solution: Built an auto-ID dialogue system where designers only had to input text.
Outcome: Narrative content was implemented smoothly despite late script delivery.
Proper Looping of Character Animation using Sprite Sheets
Objective: Ensure that the characters moved according to artist's vision.
Observed issue: Our artist didn't want to jump in the engine but had notes about how the characters should be animated and wanted it done in that specific format.
Solution: Talking with the artist, understanding how long a frame needed to be on screen before going to the next one for every character.
Outcome: Artist vision was fulfilled and gave the game different senses of motion highlighting certain actions in the game.
Proper Looping of Character Animation using Sprite Sheets
Objective: Ensure that the characters moved according to artist's vision.
Observed issue: Our artist didn't want to jump in the engine but had notes about how the characters should be animated and wanted it done in that specific format.
Solution: Talking with the artist, understanding how long a frame needed to be on screen before going to the next one for every character.
Outcome: Artist vision was fulfilled and gave the game different senses of motion highlighting certain actions in the game.
Producer
Producer
Producer
Managed and Tracked Tasks with Artists and Designers over 3 Time Zones.
Objective: Wanted a way to organize and create a system that allowed for people to share information and communicate with team members they needed to without waiting a week for all hands meetings
Observed issue: This project was completed over COVID with people being in various time zones making meetings hard.
Solution: Have once a week team meeting at a time that worked for all parties. I also implemented a "Work Availability" method where everyone would give times that they would work and what days through the week. This let people on the team ask each other questions without having to wait for the weekly meeting. As a producer I would ask that if they do meet that they give some message in the discord relating to it.
Outcome: A team that was unified and was able to talk to one another making the best of the remote workflow
Managed and Tracked Tasks with Artists and Designers over 3 Time Zones.
Objective: Wanted a way to organize and create a system that allowed for people to share information and communicate with team members they needed to without waiting a week for all hands meetings
Observed issue: This project was completed over COVID with people being in various time zones making meetings hard.
Solution: Have once a week team meeting at a time that worked for all parties. I also implemented a "Work Availability" method where everyone would give times that they would work and what days through the week. This let people on the team ask each other questions without having to wait for the weekly meeting. As a producer I would ask that if they do meet that they give some message in the discord relating to it.
Outcome: A team that was unified and was able to talk to one another making the best of the remote workflow
Scoped Game to Better Fit Team Composition
Objective: Make a game that allowed for everyone to shine through and not be reliant on one specific person or team.
Observed issue: Our team was mostly art heavy with one designer/engineer (me)
Solution: Make the game art heavy and use small easy to implement mini games. Don't have super connected systems but instead systems that are unique from each other and have the story link it all together.
Outcome: A fun short experience that uses mini-games to serve as gameplay with a basic loop in the hub world to simplify things for me.
Scoped Game to Better Fit Team Composition
Objective: Make a game that allowed for everyone to shine through and not be reliant on one specific person or team.
Observed issue: Our team was mostly art heavy with one designer/engineer (me)
Solution: Make the game art heavy and use small easy to implement mini games. Don't have super connected systems but instead systems that are unique from each other and have the story link it all together.
Outcome: A fun short experience that uses mini-games to serve as gameplay with a basic loop in the hub world to simplify things for me.
Major Contributions - Deeper Dive
Major Contributions - Deeper Dive
Design for Highlighting Subject Matter
Design for Highlighting Subject Matter
Result🎉
When designing for the game, I wanted the game with all of its messages and need to educate to still feel like a game. I think it's very easy to come across as preachy or alienate your audience when creating a game like this. You can have massive paragraphs of text explaining something or have mechanics vague enough that most people don't pick up what is being trying to be communicated. What we tried to do to combat this is make the lessons we wanted the player to learn to be backed into gameplay.
Result🎉
When designing for the game, I wanted the game with all of its messages and need to educate to still feel like a game. I think it's very easy to come across as preachy or alienate your audience when creating a game like this. You can have massive paragraphs of text explaining something or have mechanics vague enough that most people don't pick up what is being trying to be communicated. What we tried to do to combat this is make the lessons we wanted the player to learn to be backed into gameplay.
Result🎉
When designing for the game, I wanted the game with all of its messages and need to educate to still feel like a game. I think it's very easy to come across as preachy or alienate your audience when creating a game like this. You can have massive paragraphs of text explaining something or have mechanics vague enough that most people don't pick up what is being trying to be communicated. What we tried to do to combat this is make the lessons we wanted the player to learn to be backed into gameplay.
Problem 🔍
Games with a message are usually heavy handed and light on gameplay. It's easy to make something with huge paragraphs and huge blocks of text with little to no context with the actual gameplay or the gameplay takes a backseat leaving the game feeling more like you're being talked to instead of engaging with it.
Problem 🔍
Games with a message are usually heavy handed and light on gameplay. It's easy to make something with huge paragraphs and huge blocks of text with little to no context with the actual gameplay or the gameplay takes a backseat leaving the game feeling more like you're being talked to instead of engaging with it.
Problem 🔍
Games with a message are usually heavy handed and light on gameplay. It's easy to make something with huge paragraphs and huge blocks of text with little to no context with the actual gameplay or the gameplay takes a backseat leaving the game feeling more like you're being talked to instead of engaging with it.
Solution 💡
To make gameplay elements based on things I wanted to impart to the player. Almost a backwards approach of emotional moments that I wanted to highlight then trying to create minigames based on that.
Solution 💡
To make gameplay elements based on things I wanted to impart to the player. Almost a backwards approach of emotional moments that I wanted to highlight then trying to create minigames based on that.
Solution 💡
To make gameplay elements based on things I wanted to impart to the player. Almost a backwards approach of emotional moments that I wanted to highlight then trying to create minigames based on that.
Design Process
Design Process
Do Research
The first step was to understand the cause of alcoholism and see what points needed to be highlighted. Instead of focusing on scary evils of alcoholism which many media already do was to try a gentler and more scientific approach.
Do Research
The first step was to understand the cause of alcoholism and see what points needed to be highlighted. Instead of focusing on scary evils of alcoholism which many media already do was to try a gentler and more scientific approach.
Prototype Mini-games around it
Now that we had the points as to why people get addicted, it gave us certain points that we wanted to focus around. We first created a paper prototype of the overall idea that used shopping as our addiction topic. It gave us a good idea, but just wasn't what we were looking for, so I decided to pivot.
Players understand and retain information if they are given context and are encouraged to engage with it. For example, we used a scale mini game to showcase how dopamine production becomes dependent on alcohol and how a higher dosage is required for the brain to get the same amount of dopamine. By having players interact with alcohol and dopamine, it becomes more obvious how alcohol affects the brain and the production of dopamine.
Prototype Mini-games around it
Now that we had the points as to why people get addicted, it gave us certain points that we wanted to focus around. We first created a paper prototype of the overall idea that used shopping as our addiction topic. It gave us a good idea, but just wasn't what we were looking for, so I decided to pivot.
Players understand and retain information if they are given context and are encouraged to engage with it. For example, we used a scale mini game to showcase how dopamine production becomes dependent on alcohol and how a higher dosage is required for the brain to get the same amount of dopamine. By having players interact with alcohol and dopamine, it becomes more obvious how alcohol affects the brain and the production of dopamine.
Write the story
The final step was to fill in the details and see what could be said by patrons and what needed to be shown in the minigames. The story overall is fairly simple and it has to be to highlight the mini-games and make players pay attention to the characters, while also keeping in mind that our time to work on the project was limited as well.
Write the story
The final step was to fill in the details and see what could be said by patrons and what needed to be shown in the minigames. The story overall is fairly simple and it has to be to highlight the mini-games and make players pay attention to the characters, while also keeping in mind that our time to work on the project was limited as well.
Decide Characters to update
The first step was to understand the characters that needed to be updated. Due to the overall scope and time, we had to limit the characters that would be updated throughout the game. I was the only technical designer so it was up to me to implement it and after talking to narrative, I convinced them that we could do two characters that were persistently updated while the rest could have a little bit. This resulted in the Mayor character being chosen as he would serve as a connecting factor for taking care of the town and Pigskin which was our team's mascot.
Developer Commentary Playthrough
Developer Commentary Playthrough
Post Mortem
Post Mortem
Achievments
Designed a game with a strong positive message
Collaborated with people from other divisions and ran a fairly on track project.
Learned and worked with a brand new engine coding and implementing the entirety of the game.
Achievments
Designed a game with a strong positive message
Collaborated with people from other divisions and ran a fairly on track project.
Learned and worked with a brand new engine coding and implementing the entirety of the game.
Achievments
Designed a game with a strong positive message
Collaborated with people from other divisions and ran a fairly on track project.
Learned and worked with a brand new engine coding and implementing the entirety of the game.
Challenges
Learning a Brand-New Engine
Creating a game with a strong social message is a lot harder than you'd think. You have to be respectful and give time to the topic and ensure players are engaged.
Working as a sole designer is very difficult and by not having other's to bounce ideas off of, playtests and design documents became paramount to this game.
Challenges
Learning a Brand-New Engine
Creating a game with a strong social message is a lot harder than you'd think. You have to be respectful and give time to the topic and ensure players are engaged.
Working as a sole designer is very difficult and by not having other's to bounce ideas off of, playtests and design documents became paramount to this game.
Challenges
Learning a Brand-New Engine
Creating a game with a strong social message is a lot harder than you'd think. You have to be respectful and give time to the topic and ensure players are engaged.
Working as a sole designer is very difficult and by not having other's to bounce ideas off of, playtests and design documents became paramount to this game.
Takeaways
Doing Research is important no matter what. You have to understand and give respect to what you're doing.
Takeaways
Doing Research is important no matter what. You have to understand and give respect to what you're doing.
Takeaways
Doing Research is important no matter what. You have to understand and give respect to what you're doing.
similar work
Cardboard Chronicles
overview
Role
Design Lead/ Technical Designer
Engine
Unreal Engine 4.27/5
Duration
6 months
Team Size
13 People
Platforms