Midwest Goodbye

A Narrative Deckbuilder where you have conversations by playing cards.

Saying goodbye at any function in the Midwest takes seemingly forever, but you have other things to do. Start a conversation with this narrative deck builder that follows you through moments of your life and makes you want to call your grandma. Using a deck builder as a metaphor for growing and changing as a person, Midwest Goodbye asks you to relive various key moments throughout your life with your family. While you might’ve wanted to get out of a conversation with your grandma quickly at first, taking your first steps into the world on your own might leave you wishing you’d spent a little more time talking with her.

I was invited to work on Midwest Goodbye by a fellow Bradley student as a summer project to simulate a trial run of capstone. I can confidently say this was the most well organized project I've worked on to date, and I'm very proud of the lessons we all learned.

Aside from having weekly meetings with our team, we were expected to be available to answer questions or join calls during working hours from 6-10pm every weekday.

The lessons I learned from this project showed me how to properly set up and follow pipelines in order to support a large team size.

The Making of Midwest Goodbye

One of the biggest challenges we faced during this project was it being entirely remote.

Meetings were hosted over Discord, so I wanted everything I communicated to be backed up with strong visuals(My favorite communication method!).

This meant lots of slideshows and flowcharts, along with the typical design documents and meeting notes.

Snippet of our shared dialogue boards, hosted in FigJam

MG Card Gameplay (Abridged Ver)

In the early stages of the project I worked on the design team to prototype the card gameplay.

Here's a slideshow I made to essentially storyboard the turn flow of card gameplay before it was programmed in engine.

Later on in the project I was introduced to the concept of working on functional teams or strike teams.

Specifically I worked on the world team with artists and sound designers to make the 3D environment feel like home.

Greyboxing

Implementing art assets

Final asset implementation with lighting