MY CONTRIBUTIONS
* Spent fifteen weeks leading a team to develop a casual stealth game.
* Designed & built a level that changed as the game progressed
* Collaborated with programmers to design fun mechanics, to create an enjoyable
gameplay loop.
* Wrote dialogue
* Ensured the theme and style of the game was persistent between members and disciplines
EXPERIENCE ON THE PROJECT
- Producer -
As the main producer on the game, much of my time was spent ensuring everyone was on task, and staying apprised of where everyone was at, as well as helping
them adapt and pivot to different tasks when
necessary.
To help do this, I made a rough schedule early on, which attempted to ensure nobody would reach a point where anyone would have to wait on someone else to continue their part of the production.
When a member finished a task I would ensure they moved to the next task that was necessary, everyone was usually very efficient at figuring their next task out when they completed something, and shifting without my guidance.
However, on occassion a member would be unsure about which task to take, and then I would interevene by asking them to complete a task I surmised aligned with both their ability and the priority list based on their previous work.
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- Level Designer -
As the sole level designer on the game I scoped it down
to a single level- a town- that changed over the seven different nights.
The way my programmers and I approached this was by turning each night into its own element in the engine hierarchy with prefabs that would be turned on or off. This way each night the previous night’s configuration would deactivate, and the new night’s configuration would activate.
This meant I was able to build up the town, and arrange scenery into a sort of default state, and then on
each night copy the last and then rearrange it a little, adding and removing parts of the previous night to
effectively make the town change.
This effectively saw the town grow from an open care free town with a market at its centre, to a town full of barricades, coffins, angry guards, and a sort of podium dedicated to the eradication of unholy things at the centre of town.
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- Narrative Designer -
As the sole narrative and level designer on the game, I
did both at once. I tried to give the town some flavour,
make it feel like it had some history and tell little
pieces of environmental storytelling along the paths
the player might take.
To this effect I made it so each night the amount of gravemarkers would increase in the graveyard, to show
that the people the player was eating were being remembered.
I also made it so as the player got closer to the final night, there would be an increase of warning posters that told townsfolk to beware.
I made some of the barriers that get put up throughout the town, broken on the later nights, to both help the player a little with the increase of difficulty, but also to imply unrest with the townsfolk, who seem to have destroyed their own defences.
Other pieces of environmental storytelling include an increase of coffins carried in carts, and some carts in the low end of town seeming to move during the day, and the change from market to gallows.