Natural Disaster: A Butterfly's Guide to Mass Destruction

Steam Game

Explore my journey through the EAE Capstone course at the University of Utah, a year-long endeavor that led to the creation of Natural Disaster: A Butterfly’s Guide to Mass Destruction, a whimsical puzzle game now available on Steam. This course brought together a team of 30 developers from various disciplines, challenging us to collaborate and innovate while acting as a functioning video game studio.

The team, Burning Reel Studios, utilized Unreal Engine 5, Perforce, Wwise, HackNPlan, Blendr, Adobe Creative Suite, and more to develop Natural Disaster. I took on the role of Lead Engineer while also picking up a few additional roles during development. Learn more below.

Play on Steam

Role(s)

Lead Engineer

Machinima Producer

Machinima Engineer

Lighting Engineer

Artist

Skills

UE Blueprints

Source Control

SDL

Time Management

Task Management

Tools

Unreal Engine 5

HackNPlan

Perforce

Adobe Photoshop

Development Time

8 months

Natural Disaster

A Butterfly's Guide to Mass Destruction

Natural Disaster was originally pitched as a 'silly, morbid game'. The pitched emphasized the desire to have 7 locations tied together through potential player actions view through a View Master. In fact, up until halfway through development, the razor pitch for all presentations and documentation was

"Natural Disaster is a point-and-click inspired adventure game set in a View Master. In which the player explores different scenes, insighting different disasters by virtue of the butterfly effect."

Burning Reel Studios had no desire to drastically change or alter the premise of Natural Disaster. However, through the standard course of development it was clear the game was developing into something much bigger than a 'silly, morbid game'. This is how Natural Disaster is presented on Steam.

“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” –Edward Lorenz, “The Butterfly Effect”

Natural Disaster: A Butterfly’s Guide to Mass Destruction is a slapstick puzzle game with inspiration from point-and-click classics of how one very evil butterfly can bring down an empire. Explore a world through a stereoscope, test your limits as a teeny butterfly in a human’s world, and start chains of cause-and-effect that ripple across the seven scenes to disastrous results.

A SMALL WORLD OF SMALL PUZZLES Investigate the environment to discover items you can carry, objects you can activate, and places you can land to find how to lead these people to their worst nightmares.

PLAY THROUGH A STEREOSCOPE VIEWER Explore seven rich 3D locations through the lens of a stereoscope. Follow the characters through paths with multiple endings as your actions in one scene continue in another.

TIME LOOP TRIALS Upon your death, you find yourself back at the beginning, and all of the humans’ peaceful lives restored. It’s a time loop trap…or an opportunity for new methods.

A BUTTERFLY NEVER FORGETS Your shenanigans are logged the Scrapbook. It journals everything you’ve learned about your targets across multiple trials and is a guide for what the butterfly might be curious to try next.

HOLD ON…A WIZARD? In all your exploits, no one seems to notice that it is a butterfly causing their misfortune. But what happens when somebody does?

About My Capstone Experience

The University of Utah Entertainment Arts and Engineering's Final Class

The capstone course aimed to test and apply the skills acquired throughout our academic journey while providing guidance in abstracting our experiences. In the EAE capstone course, our challenge was to create a video game from the ground up. Following an industry model, we worked collaboratively in smaller teams, with students taking on engineering, creative, and administrative roles.

This context required us to wear multiple hats due to smaller teams and shorter development timelines. Within the framework of Natural Disaster, I took on various roles, including lead engineer, lighting engineer, UI/UX engineer, machinima producer, and more. This dynamic environment fostered adaptation and skill enhancement.

Our games resembled those on platforms like Steam or Itch.io, offering an excellent addition to our portfolios. This challenge pushed us intellectually and personally. By course end, we'd experienced the full game development process and thrived in an interdisciplinary setting, collaborating with peers, faculty, and industry professionals.

Natural Disaster gained immense popularity among the staff and stood out as a visually impressive game. Its impact was so profound that the EAE department chose a screenshot of the game as the header image for the Master's program, despite its origin as a project within the Bachelor's program. This recognition underscored the exceptional quality and creativity that our team brought to the project.

Short development periods, small team numbers, T-shaped development experience, and wanting to make the best game possible resulted in many members of Burning Release Studios (Natural Disaster's development studio name) wearing multiple hats...including me! Below I have sectioned out my experience working on Natural Disaster by the roles I took on, I have started from my largest/most time-intensive roles and worked downwards.

Lead Engineer

As the Lead Engineer I took on a variety of tasks in a variety of engineering-related areas.

Hover to Learn More

Machinima Producer and Engineer

A large element of Natural Disaster was the dynamic narrative events. Utilizing Unreal Engine's Level Sequencer, I worked as both the Machinima Producer and an engineer/artist to help create these events.

Pipeline Creation

We wanted the pipeline utilized by the machinima team to be as efficient as possible. We all had other school responsibilities and other areas of Natural Disaster that we were working on. I sat down to iron out the best way to split the machinima team and the best way to define the development pipeline to ensure we were able to both complete all the machinima events but also to ensure they were well done.

As shown in the image above, we ironed out a process that ensured each machinima event passed through the hands of at least 3 individuals, each of which with a different skillset and a different goal in mind. Our designers were apart of the base team, they set up basic block outs of our machinima elements, then they passed through myself or my other engineer where we polished what was given to us and added engineering elements like blended animations, VFX, and attached assets (characters holding things properly). Finally, the machinima events passed to our VFX and animation artists who either marked the events as complete or did the final polish on them.

Pipeline Assignment

After determining the pipeline that would best work for the machinima team I worked with a producer to hand select which members of Burning Reel Studios would be apart of the machinima team. I assigned each member the sub-team they would be on and provided them with what they would be tasked with.

The final element of being a producer for the machinima team required I ran the stand-up's, assigned tasks, managed the team's HackNPlan, and ensured the sub-teams were completing their tasks and working together.

This sequence showcases the largest machinima element created by the machinima team, it had the most moving characters, it was the longest in terms of time, it utilized the largest objects, and it was the the dynamic narrative event the team had been dreaming about for months. I was fortunate enough to get to work on this event.

Getting the ferris wheel to even move was a challenge, to ensure it moved at a realistic speed and in the correct directions I had to create two of it's own level sequences. From there I needed to time the sub-level sequences and the clown's to make the climbing and the overall sequence look at least somewhat realistic. It took over 2 hours just to get the ferris wheel to spin and roll properly before I could even think about getting the clowns and the environement to react to it.

I was able to speak with Associate Professor and Co-Founder of the EAE Department, Roger Altizer, about the Ferris Wheel Roll during EAE Launch.

You can watch the full video where we talk about different development insights or you can skip to 13:20 to watch the portion where we talk about the Ferris Wheel Roll.

Lighting Engineer

Lighting Overhaul

I took all 7 scenes and worked with lighting elements to increase player immersion. I would rotate and change the hue of the 'sun' within sublevels, add in additional lighting (bulb, spotlight, etc), created light-emitting materials to put on objects, and work in level sequences to make lights change based on player actions. I utilized all these options within each scene to customize each scene to have disctinct and realistic lighting.

Performance Check

Working in Unreal Engine 5 I had the opportunity to poke around with static, old-school dynamic, and Lumen dynamic lighting. Because each scene was in a different sub-level, each scene's lighting was in a different sub-level, and the 'sun' was in it's own sublevel I had to ensure I was thorougly testing the performance of additional lighting and lighting changes. It was important to the team that the game was still functional on developer's machines but also was able to run consistently at 30 FPS for release. I frequently ran performance testing for lighting and other areas of the game.

Below I have put before and after images of each scene to showcase the lighting change.

Artist

Small art peices that allowed the main artists of the team to focus on the bigger art elements.

Loading Icon

Due to some of the lighting changes I made, the time it took to navigate from the main menu to the world took a few seconds. I drew up a very basic loading icon matching the theme of the game to ensure the user was looking at something instead of a black screen.