Baacadia
Baacadia is an 3D exploration puzzle game that transforms shepherding into an epic journey across an untamed world. Guide your herd through an alien landscape as you explore, observe, and communicate with its mysterious flora and fauna, uncovering the wonders hidden within. Selected as one of 8 USC Games 2025 Advanced Game Projects.
Role: Lead Designer
Platform: PC | Unity
Genre: 3D Puzzle
Team: 30 students, work in progress
Contribution
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As Lead Designer of a 30+ member team, hosting weekly design meetings, overseeing vision, workflow, and deliverables.
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Authored and maintained the Game Design Document (GDD) to align mechanics, design pillars, player goal, narrative, and art direction.
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Collaborated cross-disciplinarily with art, narrative, engineering, QA, and audio teams to ensure cohesive gameplay and production quality.
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Directed iteration on core mechanics and player experience, emphasizing ecological sound-based puzzles and exploration.
Core Game Loop
Core Mechanics
Core Mechanic: Record and playback any sound in the foreign world to explore, experiment, and solve ecological puzzles.
Level Example
In this level, players encounter a large bird patrolling around a central tree, guarding moss balls that fall from its branches. Nearby sheep graze and occasionally nudge the moss balls, trying to claim them.
The terrain forks toward a visible goal — a canyon passage leading to the next area — but the path is blocked by a giant moss ball.
Ecosystem Logic:
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The bird defends moss balls by emitting a Drive call to push sheep away.
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Sheep react to sound direction, moving toward where the bird faces.
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The player learns that sheep can push moss balls.
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By recording and replaying the bird’s Drive sound, the player can command sheep to clear the blocked passage and progress forward.