B.L.U.E

What I got assigned to do:

I started out working as the Narrative Lead. My directors, Dylan & Kai, and I are interested in the combination of realism and sci-fi. TV series Andor and the game Kerbal Space Program and many more are all part of the initial inspirations.

How I approach this:

 At the early stage of ideation, we decided to use the lore as a starting point to determine what to include in the game. We co-wrote a full lore/backstory with a span of 50 years. It's a projected history starting from 2026 all the way into the 2060s, with a political thriller vibe that naturally extends to the factions & technologies used in future games.

Debate on vision:

Quickly, we were faced with engineering difficulties. We projected to make this into a massive PvP-focused playground, including different teams. At that point, we couldn't think it was possible, and figuring out backup plans and pivoted to something like the game Beseige-- with several levels of dedicated sandbox to let a single player solve the goal with player build machine. 

How I participated:

Our team was split in 2, and we had to pick a side to go. I personally was an avid supporter of the original vision. To get it passed as a unanimous decision, I reached out to all most all of the team members in person, engineers and artists alike. I tried to talk with them about what games they passionated about for my just-enough knowledge of various types of games. What I'm aiming for is to reignite our team's passion for the game we ourselves are making, for if that's lost, the team would fracture even more. 

My thoughts after:

In the final vote, the Multiplayer vision did get passed. I do wish I could do a better job making more of onboarding the other side with this decision. This is what I should improve on.
With the amazing engineering team, we later confirmed that this is plausible. 

Work after narrative:

From then on, my work as narrative lead was put on hold, as we are more focused on the implementation of gameplay ideas with artists + designers, and the multiplayer backbone by the engineers.  

I started transitioning to a more general designer role. I first wrote all the item descriptions, which are rooted in the lore previously mentioned. From there, we as the design team touched on the different potential characteristics of parts, playstyles, and ultimately balancing the uniqueness and stats of parts.

Weekly meetings:

The most valuable and treasured time of mine during this process is the weekly cross-disciplinary meeting with 10+ people on site. We as developers get to be updated on each other's progress in work, but also know each other's personal preferences and workflow. I get to talk with artists about what inspired their railgun design, or with engineers about their experience in games like War Thunder.

 Workflow Problems

By talking across all disciplines, I get to notice a production issue. We in each discipline are only combining our thoughts during the weekly meetings. We couldn't get access to other's work as programmers were on GitHub, artists on Figma, designers on Notion, and to help production, we had ClickUp for checking tasks. It's too much to check not just as a single developer but also for the directors.

 
Central node of Operation:

I reached out to our amazing production team, Andrew and Vivian, and proposed that we should cut all the layers and have a central node for all the tasks at hand. We chose Notion as it's really welcoming for small teams like us, with all the connectors to Google Suite, Figma, and GitHub. We also encourage the use of weekly devlog updates as a reminder and for record-keeping.

 Work for levels:

I later helped on the ideation of the levels, considering different potential environmental variations such as vents of the moon, scattered rocks, and lighting from the molten core with a star afar.

 Ready for Expo:

I also worked on the tutorial sequence with Nick from engineering.  I started out storyboarding, breaking down all controls. For each step, the tutorial would only introduce 2 sets of controls. We got to showcase the game at USC Games Expo in time with tutorials & parts stats fixes in time.