Role: Lead Developer and Designer
Year: December 2023
Engine: Unity
Platform: Desktop
Target Audience: primarily the ‘housewife’ demographic.
Available at: Link temporarily down.

Description:

With this task I led a team of four including myself; two designers and two programmers. Our task was to create a simple game that had ten minutes of gameplay and could be the start of a project for Transfuzer. We had eight weeks to complete this task.

What did I do:

• As the team lead I created the Pitch Deck and marketing documentation to try to secure funding.
• I saw to the games rerolling three times as the first two did not have good player feedback.
• I created multiple assets from characters to buildings.
• I created the level itself.
• I created the designs for two out of the four puzzles and assisted with a thirds design, and the balancing of the fourth.
• Implemented changes through the QA/Playtesting of the game.
  
  

Challenges:

Originally when we first rolled this game it started as a cyberpunk type game with a roguelite feel to it. However this game received some negative feedback in terms of the loop being too simple, we did try to salvage it but reworking it and still maintaining the fun factor would have cost too much time so I decided that we should reroll it and try again, and this bore the new version called Cast Aside.
The first of this game was all about a vampire trying to utilise shadows to get through the area, the player feedback enjoyed the shadow mechanic but not necessarily the setting, so I said we should change it up and we went with a more ancient Egyptian theme due to the cultural relevance of the sun and shadows. I actioned my team on discord and kept track of tasks through Trello, and as such even with the 2 rerolls and four weeks of dev time for the third iteration, my team still delivered a strong effort. And as a result of my team actioning these requests and adding feedback they felt necessary it meant I could focus on completing the pitch deck, marketing, and other design documentation such as the living Game Design Document. This was also while I was creating the characters and other assets in this and previous rolls of the game. The characters in this one while simple, largely drew on the cultural aspects of Egypt and were based on research of ancient Egyptian gods and their associated animals. The building assets were largely third party, however I Lego bricked some of them together to make new buildings such as the temple in the last image.
While my team put in a lot of effort with this one and we are pleased with the final result I think the general consensus is we would like to go back and try to do the cyberpunk game. It has a spark and we all feel it should be explored.