The Wishing Tree

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In The Wishing Tree, you play as Damira, who’s making her way up a mythical wish-granting tree in order to make a wish. We join her on her journey to overcome her grief over the loss of her brother in a prior incident.

Project Details

  • Team size: 12
  • Genre: Action, Narrative-heavy, 3D platformer (with swing elements)
  • Engine: Custom
  • Duration: 28 weeks

Role: Producer

Responsibilities
  • 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.

Production Achievements / Challenges:

  • This project was actually one of the most challenging projects during my school years. In addition to leading a team of 12 members alone as their Producer, we also had trouble finalizing our game idea until the second half of the development timeline. My key takeaway from this project is learning how to deal with having a creative block on the team, and what are some of the things that can be done to resolve it.
  • This was also the first project I worked on where each of the members had different level of commitments towards the project. Most of my previous projects were much smaller in team sizes, everyone was committed to making a good game, and were more accepting towards the ideas I proposed. My key takeaway from this is learning how to work with members of various personalities and different work ethics compared to myself.
  • For the first half of the project, it was development hell due to constantly changing narrative (scope creep), no clear vision on the mechanics. However, we did manage to make it work in the end through constant (weekly) iteration and tons of internal play-testing.
  • I also learned to listen to the needs of individual members more, and it is always exciting for me to be able to learn how to balance each of the members’ working style while at the same time keeping them motivated and pushing towards making a great product.
  • Overall, I enjoyed working on this project, and once again appreciate all the hard work and efforts that my team put into the game.

Awards and Recognition

Digipen Singapore Game Awards 2019

Winner for:

Shopee Best Junior Technology
NetVirta Best 3D Physics Technology
Koei Tecmo Singapore Best 3D Visual Design

Finalist for:

Game of the Year
Best Junior Game
Ubisoft Singapore Best 3D Graphics Technology
Best Music and Sound Design

Project Timeline

The project was divided into 6 milestones, over a period of 28 weeks, with each milestone being 4-5 weeks long. Below is a brief overview of our journey, ordered from the most recent phase to the oldest phase.

The earliest milestone was pre-production, which was done before the project officially started.

Gold Milestone

For the Gold milestone, the game went into the polishing stage, and also came together as a product.

We went into the final stages of production by completing the final segment of the game by rounding off our narrative. 

For polish, we worked on improving the overall experience our players are able to get by adding in small little feedback such as respawn, or more precise landing animations. 

We paced the level out better based on previous feedback and also tried to balance out the overall visual experience to the best of our abilities.

Scope Complete

For our Scope Complete milestone, the game as a whole was finally shaping up to be something that the entire team could be proud of.

The narrative, with the added touch of the voice-overs made for a more compelling and immersive experience compared to before.

Our audio and background music were also added in, which allowed the player to really get into the feel of the game.

Our artists were also hard at work to make the game look good by adjusting the lightings and making sure that there were nothing wrong with the assets that were within the engine.

Last but not least, the mechanics was finally in a state that need not really be tweaked too much, and feels MUCH better compared to before.

Vision Complete
In the Vision Complete milestone, we had a lot of the content done for the narrative, and our mechanic improved drastically compared to the previous milestone.

However, our art was noticeably lacking as our artists were mostly involved in content creation and did not really have much say on the art direction of the game. We rectified that after this milestone by getting the artists involved and making full use of their talents.

Narrative wise, we had to cut down our story even more by radically cutting out parts of the narrative. However, compared to the shaky foundation of the first half of the production cycle, we definitely are on a more firm footing right now.

Vertical Slice

For our Vertical Slice milestone, we had a version of the game where we had what we wanted the swing to feel like, but lots of iteration work were still necessary in order to make the gameplay satisfying to the player.

This milestone was also where we were still finding our footing in terms of level design as there were potentially big chunks of empty spaces and our level designer had to find the right balance between creating playable paths and also filling in the world decoration which took up a lot of time.

Our narrative is also constantly evolving, as last milestone we were very close to the trunk of the tree, but this milestone we are just climbing a giant tree.

Prototype

For the Prototype milestone, we radically changed our idea in terms of narrative, and also setting and the general design direction.

Our designer felt that doing a 3D puzzle platformer with an action heavy mechanic was not feasible, as she tried for 7 weeks to come up with something.

Also, the grappling hook as an idea felt very constrained when used within the tight confines of the tunnel, thus, we decided from this milestone to focus more on the grappling hook rather than the puzzle elements.

Our game is now based upon a gigantic tree, so as to give the players more space to use the grappling hook.

Engine Proof

For our Engine Proof milestone, we struggled with our game idea as we radically changed our idea from what we had planned during pre-production. 

Thus, for Engine Proof, we came up with a new idea, based on the idea of grappling hook and puzzle based activity. The game was set in an abandoned tunnel complex.

For the unreal prototype, the design team implemented a few features:

  • Grappling
  • Climbing up a ledge
  • Opening doors using switches
Pre-production

Original story design document

For our pre-production, we spent our time working on a grand idea during our Summer spent in Redmond, WA. 

We had a lore planned out for an epic strategy game which would take the players through desert, a township, and straight into the belly of a gigantic golem.

However, when we consulted with the Redmond lecturer, he pointed out a fatal flaw of our game being 20 man too little, and needing 2 years worth of development time in order to make it work.

Thus, we left Redmond, and headed back to Singapore with a half-baked idea, and struggling to find our footing of what we wanted to do.