BGIE Capstone – Space Traitors

Summary

As part of our final year games project we were required in teams to prototype, test a develop a game for release on the storefront of our choosing. For this we developed “Space Traitors” a cross platform, multiplayer, party game for Android and PC.

On this project I acted in the role of designer and producer as well as assisting in roles of programming and UI design and coordinating marketing efforts before release on Game Jolt and the Google Play Store.

Production
Design
Development
Testing and QA
Release

Production

During this project I acted in the role of producer, managing our team of developers from design, programming and artistic disciplines to create a final product for release at the end of 2019.

As producer I familiarized myself with and demonstrated skills in applying Agile methodologies, managing a team and keeping production within scope. Among my responsibilities as producer, I was required to develop our project plan which included our entire backlog, key milestones, Gantt charts as well as managing the execution of this plan.

Additionally I was responsible for presenting weekly stakeholder meetings and progress reports along with presenting formal pitches to industry professionals at multiple stages of development.

Design

In addition to my role as producer I also helped to design Space Traitors from its early stages all the way through to release. For this I assisted our lead designer to develop our Game Design Document that was used throughout development. We also developed paper and digital prototypes in the early stages to further narrow down our ideas.

A majority of design work was done in consultation with the other designer on the team as we modified and improved elements of the design with each weeks iteration.

Development

For this project I also participated in the development of the game, not shying away from getting involved in programming of game and learning a new skill in UI design.

For this project as most of our artists where focused on character and environment development I decided to take on the task of designing the graphics for the game’s UI elements, iconography, etc. Most of this work was done in adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and exported into Unity. It was an interesting experience devloping UI that fit the theme as well as was easily usable across mobile and PC platforms.

Regarding programming in the project I was involved in developing the game logic, programming elements of the UI and some elements of the net-code. This project is a good demonstration of the wide variety of skills I’ve gathered in Unity development.

Testing and QA

As part of any game development project Testing and QA was extremely important for this year long project. For it we developed a testing regiment in which we took naive play testers and set up a testing environment with multi device recording, as well as audio and video recording of the test subjects. This was accompanied by surveys and interviews to fully understand how players were responding to our product and what changes could be made in the next iteration. Often we were required to play-test with multiple users at the same time and this process streamlined our play-testing experience.

All data was collated and stored so it could be referred to effectively for design choices moving forward and all technical bugs were listed and tracked for ease of use by the programming team.

Furthermore, prior to release we completed a full QA test by cataloging and testing every individual component of the game to ensure quality and have an idea of what can be fixed in patches after release.

Release

As producer I was also responsible for the final release of our game, of which we decided to release primarily on Game Jolt and the Google Play Store as well as on Itch.io and IndieDB. By releasing on Google Play I had become fairly experienced with the Google Play pipeline and what is required for a game to be supported on their storefront.

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I also lead a majority of the teams marketing and PR efforts which lead to the game being featured on several gaming news websites. For more information check out the portfolio page below:

This project was perhaps one of the largest I have undertaken so far in my career and as a result I feel that I have gained a lot of valuable experience in all aspects of development, design and marketing and hope to be able to further grow as a game developer.