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Mau Lundell
Technical Designer
About:
Undead Inc. is a high-risk, high-reward resource management simulator. Slip into the lab coat of your preferred Endswell Director and establish and manage a local subsidiary of the Endswell Medical Corporation. Build, manage staff, conduct research, and trade in both legal and illegal goods and services.
Details:
Roles:
Gameplay Designer, UI & UX Designer,
UI Programmer
My Time On The Project:
Oct 2022 - Aug 2024
Genre:
Management, Strategy, Simulation
Tools:
Unreal Engine 4
Workspace:
Hybrid (Both offline and online)
My Contributions
The link between Code and Design
Taking Designs from high level concepts to implementable code
Communications between code team and design team
Management = UI
UI and UX Design
UI Programming
In charge of the UI taskforce
Team Helper
Structuring tasks for design and code
In charge of weekly meetings
With management games come LOTS of UI
Understanding the genre
I've never been a hardcore management gamer, but to deepen my knowledge of the genre, I decided to explore similar titles. I started by playing some cool titles in the genre like "Two Point Hospital," "RimWorld," and "Fallout Shelter." It's been a fun way to explore the genre and see what works and what doesn't!
Learning UMG and C++
Upon joining the team during production, I found my place handling UI implementation. Though unfamiliar with UMG and never having used Unreal C++, my quick code language analysis skills helped me grasp the structure and get the game's UI up and running.
UMG
C++ using Rider
An iterative process
The design of the UI was constantly being improved upon each week through rigorous testing. And as the project went on I took a bigger and bigger role in ensuring we came over the finish line with as good UX as possible.
In the end, the UI looked amazing and had some neat UX solutions being applied to ensure player satisfaction.
HUD Pre-Alpha
What the HUD looked like in Pre Alpha.
HUD Final
What the HUD looked like in the final version of the game.
Room Menu UI Final
What the Room Menu looked like in the version of the game.
HUD Pre-Alpha
What the HUD looked like in Pre Alpha.
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Being ready for Localization
As I was implementing UI into the project I also ensured that each string was accounted for being localized. This was done through setting up workflows in Excel and Gridly.
Then when it was time to start localizing into the 8 different languages, I was the main designer in charge of ensuring the game could be translated properly.
A Procedural Game
Creating a rougelite management gamemode
Everyone on the design team took a lot of time working on perfecting the "Career Mode", where the game would take a rougelite approach.
My main focus in this area was designing the tools necessary for creating randomly generated maps.
Designing Map Set Up
Together with the programmer and economy designer, I set up some main guidelines for what we wanted tweakable and what was technically feasible.
In the end, we managed to create a system where through the changing of certain numbers there could be tons of different variations of the same areas.
Tweaking the settings
Once we had the settings ready, the economy designer and I worked together on creating the three biomes. The "Commercial District", "Financial District", and "Industrial District" came to life!
These biome's settings were then tweaked based on some more testing before release.
Commercial District
The commercial district has a lot to of possibilities top explore in the untapped markets.
Financial District
The financial district has a lot of buisness going on, both legal and illegal.
Industrial District
The industruial disrtict is wide, with no depth.
Commercial District
The commercial district has a lot to of possibilities top explore in the untapped markets.
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What I'm proud of
Learning to work with UI
Before working on "Undead Inc." my experience working with UI was limited. That meant that I learned a lot by working with it daily for 2 years.
And now that the project is complete I feel much more confident in applying good UX practices and how to work with UI for a bigger and healthy project.
Improving my coding knowledge
I have always used coding a lot, as the more technically inclined designer. But this project was my first time working with such a large codebase and with more than 10 other collaborators.
Together with the programmers, I learned a lot of good coding practices and workflows to make everyone's work easier. And I am happy that I was able to contribute to the amazing coding team we had!
Releasing a PC Game
This was my first game with a targeted Steam release. This meant I got to experience a lot of things in regards to working with achievements, setting up playtests, and publishing the game on release.
And I am so proud that we managed to make it happen!
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