Role: Lead Developer and Designer
Year: June 2023
Engine: Unity
Platform: Desktop
Target Audience: simple survival audience, originally mobile, moved to desktop.
Available at: Link temporarily down.

Description:

My task was to lead a small team of various skills and talents and try to create a game within an 8 week window based on my Game Design Document. The premise of this game was to play as a fish on a single screen, trying to live for as long as possible while other creatures from the depths try to eat the player fish. The loop was to include black shard collectibles to allow the player to unlock customisations and skills for the character.

What did I do:

• Primarily as the team lead I organised their tasks and activities on a weekly scrum using tools such as miro and trello and communication happened in person and via discord.
• The betta fish art and iterated it several times.
• The UI art, some of the buttons can be seen in the last picture.
• Most of the menu design.
• The fish colour customisation system.
• Sound design.
• And on the side I assisted with programming and implemented features while my programmers focused on bigger issues, such as the fishes drifting up and down to simulate the ocean effect.
• Implemented changes through the QA/Playtesting of the game.
  
  

Challenges:

Scope was a big issue with this game. I thought me and my team could push further, and we ended up having to cut various parts of the game such as some of the power ups seen in the UI buttons image, as we just could not get them in by the dead line. Reasons for this was during the iterative cycle’s issues would come up, such as things not working as intended such as the fish and special fish mechanics, we had the game git files break once, and some issues with programming meant we had to take an additional week to fix that. We did fix it all but the cost to our development flow was definitely felt.
There was also an issue with the original design document, in that I had planned for the game to be mobile, but it became aware to me that my team was not so sure of that, so I rerolled it to a desktop format and we proceeded with the game project. I also had a couple of people that had not really used Unity and so that added some slowdown to development time, however it was fine and me and my team worked around it and continued to roll forwards completing many tasks each week and iteratively adding to the project such as new buttons week by week as can be seen in the videos the left.
I mainly dealt with team lead tasks such as the Game Design Documentation and updating the Trello and Miro boards as well as keeping the teams momentum going forwards, furthermore I also did some of the design work as mentioned above like the Betta fish and buttons.
Over the course of this development there was some additional feedback through the QA/Play test sessions, that people wanted the fishes to bobble as though it was in the currents of the ocean and they also wanted a “last chancer” sprint option. I personally implemented both of those and ensured they were functional. The other request was instead of hitting the screen and trying to move around threats, they wanted to wrap around, meaning the fish can go off one side and come on the other horizontally, which I implemented as well, and these simple features formed part of the iterative design and created a better user experience.
Overall I and my team did well and even with technical limitations and changes to the GDD they delivered a strong effort and I was able to learn some additional programming and design knowledge such as the fish bobbles and movement.