Rogue Bot - 3rd Person Shooter Game
Overview:
On the production of Rogue Bot, I was the Game & Sound Designer who worked with a team of developers to design and implement features through multiple milestones over a two month period for AIE's Minor Production.
Platform: PC
Game Engine: Unity
Duration: Two Months
Team Size: 7
Roles: Game & Sound Designer, Producer
Project Roles:
Producer:
Lead the development team away from ideas that were largely over-scoped for the projects time frame during the pre-production phase and beyond.
Maintained developer tasking through management software such as HacknPlan.
Served as the main point of contact for design decisions and direction of the project.
Wrote the GDD & AI Design Document that served to reflected the current state of design iteration due to my constant updates to the document.
Conducted QA testing and compiled player feedback surveys that assisted with game polish.
Game Designer:
Tasked with the designing of a projectile-based combat system that fit into the robotic sci-fi theme.
Utilized a rock paper scissors design for the enemies and projectiles with three different elements having a strength and a weakness to another element.
Made several level designs as 2-D diagrams and then as a implemented in-engine level.
Formed a sense of player progression by dividing the elemental enemies into different stages of the level and having the player unlock elements by completing each stage.
Designed by diagram the logic utilized by the AI to combat the player.
Sound Designer:
Heavily edited and repurposed creative commons sound effects that had to meet the artistic style of the assets they were paired with.
Any audio asset that didn’t make the set standard of quality or correct feel, was redone or tweaked until that standard was met.
Post-Mortem:
Rogue Bot was my first experience being on a team of developers with different disciplines to my own. As such I lack any kind of experience and struggled to find my roll within the development team. The rest of my team members while not struggling with the same issues I was, did have a lack of production experience that lead to massive overestimation of the teams abilities both in the form of raw capabilities and of what could be done in the given two months. This lead me to have to argue and debate my whole team until I eventually was able to convince them of other suggested ideas that were much more tenable. Things became better as we moved on to production but I still refrained from a leadership position due to my own naivety, so throughout the rest of the project the team never really had an idea holder.
Being both a producer and game designer, I had many responsibilities to fill and probably overstretched myself finding that i had to continue working from home in order to meet deadlines. This project, while chaotic taught me many valuable lessons that I will forever hold on to such as the need for a producer that is assertive in their job, and of being the vision holders. The need for project leads in of themselves, and for the understanding of strengths and weaknesses present in team members. As well as the necessity of raising opposition to ideas that fall outside of a project’s scope or are otherwise incompletable.
Note: All screenshots and the video reflect the work of the entire team (Programming, Art, Design, FX, SFX, etc).