Breakout Brew
Lead Designer, Producer, QA Manager
Multiplayer, 3D Platformer focused around collecting
potion ingredients to brew an escape potion.
Breakout Brew is the game my team developed for Champlain College's Senior Capstone Project for the class of 2018. During the Fall semester of 2017 the team started out as four individuals; a programmer, two artists and one designer (myself!). In total there were 24 teams participating, and only 10 were on track to make it through to the second semester of development. The teams that did not make it through were to have their members divided onto the successful teams in order to improve the games into finished products for the end of Spring 2018.
Our game, lead by myself as the producer, was able to make it to the second semester of development, and thus we picked up an animator, an additional programmer, and two level designers. From there, my focus on the project became mainly being the Producer and UX/UI Designer for the game (while also spearheading the design team).
What I learned / my biggest take-aways:
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How to act as a Producer for a team of developers and make sure the project meets specific project goals, specifications, scope, timelines, and more.
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How to take on new team members in the middle of a projects development cycle, and how to prepare the proper documentation for those individuals.
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How to design and program an interface for a split-screen game, where the number of players can change.
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How to design a foundation for gameplay, and then design multiple kinds of gamemodes around said foundational gameplay.
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Pitching aspects of a game throughout its development cycle, and presenting different aspects to teams of people. Learning how to word and pitch certain ideas and concepts in different ways, depending on the audience.
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Creating marketing materials for a project that many people are going to see, including trailers, posters, stickers, webpages, and more.
Documentation
Systems and Mechanics Table
Our team's Systems and Mechanics Table is a spreadsheet that helped us keep track of which systems were begin implemented into the game, what the progress on them was, and the different aspects of certain mechanics. I designed this table as a living reference document for the team so that we could use it in both our person development time, and to reference as a team to make sure we are staying on schedule. This is a snippet of what it would have looked like mid-development.
Market Research
I created the Market Research Document in order to give our team a vision and direction to design our game towards. The Market Research Document has an area that talks about our game's target demographic, as well as two proto-personas to use as user examples. It also includes research on games that our similar to ours in concept, and how those games were successful / unsuccessful.
