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Team Size: 9
Role: Product Owner,
Systems Designer
Project Length: 4 Months
Product Owner
Skills Used: Communication, Product Management
As Product Owner, I was tasked with upholding the vision of the game. It was my responsability to help the team keep all content added to the game kept with our vision of the end product and to make sure each team member knows whats happening in other disciplines.
Additionally, as product owner it was my responsibility to groom our project backlog, prioritize our tasks, and to remove tasks from cut features.
Player Combat
As the teams systems designer, I worked on designing how combat would work during gameplay. Given the physics-based gameplay and gameplay based around grab and carrying objects, we decided to base combat around the players grabbing ability. Allowing the player to use grabbed objects as weapons.
This system worked well as it was able to be intergrated into our players movement system without needing additional programming work and let us keep the games controls simple by making both our combat and stealing systems use the same controls.
Finally, we added some additional elements, such as knockback and a knock out system which added impact and made combat feel like it had weight.
Superpower System
Skills Used: COmbat Design, physics interaction
As a part of designing the games combat we designed a modular superpower system, where a character could have a unique ability added to them just by adding a single script. I ended up designing a magnetism ability that initially attracted all surrounding items towards the player. Which lets them carry more.
However, the ability often hindered player movement and was clunky to use. So, it was modified to pull items towards the players hands which they have more precise control over and a maximum weight threshold was added, resulting in an ability that was easier to control and more fun to use.
UI Design
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Skills Used: UI Design, graphic Design
Post-Mortem
During the course of this project I ended up with a lot more responsiblity than I intend to take at the start. Between becoming product owner to working on our systems and UI design I definitely stepped out of my comfort zone.
However, this responsibility helped a lot in my growth as a designer. I not only learnt a lot about designing for systems, but what it takes to lead a design team and how to keep a coherent vision of a final product. The game may be rougher than we wanted to make, but all I learnt during the project will shape me as a designer for years to come.
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