Morningtide Motel

Narrative Motel Sim

Slandercast Studio

Creative Director, Lead Game Designer

Development Period: January 2023 - January 2024

Tools Used: Unity, Yarn, Notion

Steam Official Page

Even the quotidian can be magical...

In Morningtide Motel, you are the owner of a podunk motel in a modern fantasy world. As a Curse of Sleeplessness begins to spread, your motel is flooded with customers for the first time in forever. Keep up with their needs and desires while you still can...

Developed primarily across 10 weeks, Morningtide Motel is a narrative game with many contrasts - a modern world defined by fantastical creatures, a bright colorful art style punctuated with uncanny hallucinations, and as Creative Director/Designer, it was my responsibility to balance all of those. I had to wear many hats both within and without our development team to ensure our team's success.

My primary accomplishments were:

Deciding upon & exploring the mechanical and narrative themes of the game
Coordinating and managing our 6-person Creative Team
Conducting playtests and compiling feedback
QA testing and bug verifying throughout production

CREATIVE FOUNDATIONS
During Morningtide Motel pre-production, we cycled through nearly a dozen different game concepts, and struggled to settle on one that we loved. I set out to define three core thematic pillars from our different concepts that really spoke to me, listed below:

You're Not The Hero - With the Curse of Sleeplessness permeating the land, the player is not the main protagonist of this world, and is instead part of the environment, operating a business during this apocalypse.
Living with the Ghosts - A theme drawn from J-Horror, the player cannot cure the Curse or save the world, and instead must learn to accept and adapt to the destruction it causes.
Modern/Fantasy Clash - The world of Morningtide Motel is a modern landscape populated by fantasy inhabitants. Magic, once abundant, is now sparse, and is replaced by the humdrum of contemporary real life.

By defining these, we finally locked in the concept for what would become Morningtide Motel. Our creative team was able to expand this world independently with their own entries while keeping the tone consistent.

CREATIVE MANAGEMENT

Stemming from our close ties to The University of Chicago, a key goal of our studio is providing an excellent, educational experience to everyone on the team. This, in conjunction with our 10-week internship constraints, led us to taking a playful approach to leadership to discover what worked best. Here are the three best things we implemented over the summer:

Cross Talk - Based on past projects, a frequent friction point was the loading of assets, especially art assets, into Unity. Our programmers would discover that they were rendered at an incompatible size, or that it didn't show up properly. We alleviated this by having our artists put their work in-engine where they could, and standardizing asset outputs where that wasn't feasible.
Team-Wide Goal Setting - At the start of the program, we introduced the team to each other in-person, and created a list of goals (some serious, some less so) that we all wanted to hit. We focused on these goals throughout the summer to support our team in their professional aspirations.
Marketing - As a development-adjacent (but critical!) aspect of launching a game, we hadn't undertaken marketing a game before. We knew we wouldn't get it right on our first try, but our goal was to understand how much to integrate marketing into our dev practices, and to have public documenting of our game that our team could use in the future. Our advertising can be found across our social media accounts, and we had a weekly devlog (both on our studio website!)

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