Second Scholar
Project Details
- Team size: 7
- Genre: Puzzle
- Engine: Custom
- Duration: 28 weeks
Role: Producer
- Ensuring team members shows up to meeting on time.
- Ensuring team members accomplishes tasks on time
- Ensuring the mental health of team members by checking in weekly to ensure workload is manageable, and to prevent burnout.
- Assigning tasks to team members using SCRUM management.
- Leading the team to ensure all milestone goals are met.
- Implemented additional lab time on Saturday to facilitate better communication between members of different disciplines by having the team work together as a whole.
- Organized bi-weekly showcase sessions where the Artist, Designers, and Programmers are able to see what their progress to the game is, and to ensure all work are being utilized to their fullest extent.
Used Agile methodologies to plan out tasks for upcoming milestones. - Programmed the game’s UI.
- Assisted with basic game logic programming.
- Assisted with basic game engine architecture.
Production Achievements / Challenges:
- One of the biggest personal challenge as Producer was the fact that this was my first time working with a full team of artists, programmers, and designers. However, as everyone was very dedicated to the project, and came back an extra day in order to work on the project. We managed to make it work through constant communication and a drive to succeed. My takeaway from this project was that having clear and concise communication is key to a project’s success.
- One of the achievement was that I was able to successfully ensure that any feature requested by either the Art or Design team was able to be understood by the Tech team clearly. I acted as the bridge between the Art/Design and Tech team while also ensuring that they are able to communicate with each other in a clear and concise manner.
- Last but not least, throughout the project, I had to ensure that the different personalities within the team did not clash too much with each other. I achieved this through taking time to understand, and observe the different personalities of the team. I also did my best to ensure that I didn’t let any issues simmer for too long, and tried my best to nip the problem in the bud to prevent the issue from ballooning.
- I felt that the greatest success of this project was that I had a good team that was willing to adopt my work ethics, and pushed hard for the best game that we’ve all made so far.
Awards and Recognition
Digipen Singapore Game Awards 2018
Winner for:
Game of the Year 2nd place
Finalist for:
Best Sophomore Game
Best Sophomore Technology
Best User Interface
Best Audio
Best 2D Visual Design
Most Innovative Design
Student’s Choice of Best Sophomore Game
Project Timeline
Gold Milestone
For the Gold submission, we were mainly focused on polishing the game, we revamped the majority of our UI assets and on making the environment look good.
Finally, we also crafted a grand total of 27 levels, just 3 shy of our initial estimation of 30 levels.
We also included a simple story in order to tie in each of the over-arching levels, and narrative of the game, while at the same time also adding in voice-overs in order to enhance the immersion experience.
Beta Milestone
One of the priority for this milestone was getting the overworld (level select screen) as seen above. We wanted to make it look like our main character was the one retracing his steps, and made it look as though he was the one who drew the various levels and stages of the game.
We also finalized the 3 different environments we would be using for the game, and continued to add feedback in order to better convey the flow of time, which was crucial to our game.
We also added a lot more environmental feedback to the game in order to better convey the flow of time.
Alpha Milestone
For the Alpha milestone, we had a good grasp on where the art direction is going. As you could see from the pictures, the core gameplay loop from which the game is built on is already present in this prototype.
We started exploring some of the UI elements, and incorporated them within the game.
Game-play wise, we explored a few more fundamental concepts which we wanted to refine in the next 2 milestones while at the same time exploring how we could improve on making the feedback better for the game.
We also continuously explored how we could accurate convey the sense of time through to the player, and we did that using the movement of the sun, and the natural movement of the water particle.
Prototype (Custom Engine)
The hardest challenge of the custom engine prototype was actually getting a concrete and unifying idea of where we wanted the art direction to go.
We were also debating whether our game should be heavily narrative focused; ultimately, we did not come to a decision this milestone as we wanted to focus and tie down the game mechanic first before proceeding to the narrative.
As you can see from the pictures, our initial prototype differed greatly from our final game. We toyed with the idea of setting up the world in a physical plane. However, we were unable to get a satisfactory result from what we have done.
For the actual game itself, since we did an initial prototype in Unity already, we had a lot of reference materials to work on for our segment prototype in our custom engine.
That helped speed up the process of the game within our custom engine, while at the same time, it allows us to explore newer mechanics in the rapid prototyping environment of the Unity Engine.
Prototype (Unity)
The game above is actually a quick and dirty prototype that my designer and I worked on, together with a separate team in order to have a proof of concept.
We used the Unity engine for our Engine proof prototype, as we were simultaneously developing both the engine and the game. Therefore, in order to explore our game idea, we worked on this during the pre-production phase.
Pre-production
The inspiration for our game actually came from Braid. One of my team member played Braid before, and found the mechanic of using movement to control time interesting.
We expanded upon that mechanic, and decided to do a 2D-puzzle game as we felt that the game had potential to be made into a fully fleshed out game.
The document shows some of the ideas we explored before settling on the Asian-influenced theme you see above.