To Be Dismantled Project

Third-Person Puzzle Game

Role: Tech Design / Narrative / UX
Team & Time: 5 people · 7 weeks
Engine: Unreal Engine 5

Introduction

To Be Dismantled is my Sophomore project. It's a short narrative-driven game where you play as a small robot stranded on an alien planet, trying to repair a failing spaceship.

Every repair costs you something: you have to sacrifice your own parts to restore the ship’s critical systems.

My Roles:

I worked across Technical Design, Narrative Design, and UX Design, and my main responsibility was making the “repair = sacrifice” idea land as a complete experience.

Technical Design: implemented key control changes after each repair, plus core level tech components (like in-world countdown screens) that support pacing and rules.
Narrative Design: planned the progression structure—what you lose at each repair, why it matters, and how the level flow and environments adapt to those losses.
UX Design: designed level-based guidance (lighting, obstacles, route framing) to keep navigation readable inside a complex spaceship, especially as controls become increasingly unreliable.

Technical Design
(Player 3C & Camera Systems)

I built a large part of the game’s technical foundation, including the player control changes that happen after each repair. Since the core loop is “fix the ship by sacrificing yourself,” I treated every lost ability as a real mechanical shift.

I also created level tech components to support pacing and urgency, like an in-world countdown screen that communicates the ship’s critical state without relying on a detached HUD.

Overall, my technical work focused on making the difficulty curve feel physical and unavoidable: every repair is progress, but it also makes the PC harder to control.

Narrative Design
(Dialogue & Tutorial)

On the narrative side, I designed the progression structure around a simple idea: each repair should feel like a meaningful sacrifice, and the environment should immediately “answer” that sacrifice.

So I planned the game as a sequence of repairs where each step removes a core function—and the level layout adapts to that change:

Repair 1: disables the robot’s jump, forcing the player to rethink traversal
Repair 2: damages the treads, making movement unstable and causing the robot to sway left/right
Final Repair: shifts the world into black-and-white, turning the last stretch into a more fragile, bleak ending beat

My goal was to make the story readable: you don’t just hear that the robot is falling apart—you feel it in your hands every time you move.

UX Design

(UI, Camera Shake, Post Processing)

For UX, I focused on helping players stay oriented inside the spaceship environment, especially as the controls get worse over time.

Instead of giving heavy UI prompts, I used level-level guidance to naturally pull the player forward.

I designed signposting through:

lighting cues to highlight the intended route or landing spots
obstacles and framing that subtly “funnel” the player toward the correct jumps and corridors
clear silhouettes and safe zones so players can make decisions quickly even when movement becomes unreliable

As the robot loses functions, good guidance becomes more important. My UX goal was to keep the next objective readable while still letting the increasing clumsiness create tension.