José Rafael Striedinger

A Deep World

Originally a student project with Berklee School of Music, later turned personal project. Guide a small green creature through a dangerous underwater world—explore, hide, and outmaneuver predators to find your lost friend.

Development: 3 months, 4 team members. In development for final release.
Platform: PC and Mac
Tools: Unity, C#, FMod

Role & contributions

As a Game Designer and Engineer:

Worked on narrative design and emotional storytelling to achieve an atmospheric and minimalist adventure
Designed and developed all game mechanics and systems, including movement, enemy AI design, UI, and cinematics.
Audio programming in collaboration with our audio designers
Worked on tech art and game feel aspects like lighting, player feedback and more

The Design Process

Ideation: Visit to CSC

After experimenting with a few mechanic-based prototypes, my teammate and I visited the California Science Center for inspiration. Observing strange sea creatures turned out to be exactly what we needed. I became fascinated by organisms with reactive, tentacle-like filaments—they sparked the idea of capturing a living, surreal underwater ecosystem that is in constant movement by the use of procedural 2D animation.

Inspired by our visit to California Science Center, I worked in squid-like movement.

Preproduction: experimenting with goals and constraints

First couple of weeks experimenting. I built movement-focused prototypes and experiments to convey character emotions without dialogue. A trip to the California Science Center and procedural animation prototypes inspired our alien underwater world setting, also leading to our key design constraint: no dialogue, minimal text.

Every single prototype tried to answer a design question:

*Can I make a player feel empathy towards a cube with just animation and audio?*

*How much spontaneous animation is needed to make players engaged with NPCs?*

Minimalist stealth gameplay

Aiming for accessibility and simplicity, I focused on movement and a single versatile mechanic, a “call” mechanic. Inspired by games like Super Meat Boy, our character remains unchanged, you get no power ups or anything like that, is the situations that change. Playtesting proved to very extremely important to get the movement just right so that players feel as a fast but fragile underwater creature.

Using the “Call” to communicate with your friend

Using “Call” to get the monster’s attention

Using “Call” to open gates

Designing AI enemies

I designed and developed the AI system for our procedurally animated monsters using Behavior Designer in Unity and callbacks to a custom script to manage states. The main idea was to mimic sight and sound perception– so they react if they see or hear you.

Over time, the AI evolved to make the monsters feel more alive. For example, I added a “frustration” state—if the player hides while being chased, the monster will wander near the hiding spot, still looking for them.

A Deep World AI design by Jose Striedinger

Enemy AI design. Clic to enlarge

Implementation on Unity with Behavior Designer, communicating with a custom script