Over the months, I gradually took on the role of director, giving me experience leading sprint meetings and planning task goals while facilitating cross-discipline communication. As the only designer, I also implemented assets, coded basic mechanics and play-tested builds, continuously improving my technical skills.. 

At the Games Academy Expo 2024, our game won 2 awards for "Enterprising Excellence" and "Best 2nd Year Game".  Following such a successful showcase, we decided to publish the game on Steam. This gave me more insight into the industry pipeline and the specific steps that any game must take to get published. 

As we continue to work on this project, I've spent a lot of time polishing usability features and balancing the ingredient stats. As well as improving accessibility with a save feature and separate audio sliders, we're also adding new enemies with unique mechanics to test the player's skill and knowledge. 

Another area we are working on is arcade mode, which spawns endless waves to really challenge the player. I want to add a system which limits certain ingredients based on the random enemies in this mode, which should provide an extra challenge and a new strategic gameplay experience. 

Above and below are some of the design documents I created for this project, made in Google Jamboard for ease of editing. I kept them updated throughout the project to adjust for scope and provide the team an easy reference of all the mechanics. 

These also show some of our planned ideas that had to be cut from the game to ensure it wouldn't be too complex for Expo, such as extra ingredients and enemy weaknesses. A lot of the ideas were adjusted to better suit the mechanics, like the cookie enemy becoming a projectile for a boss, or were otherwise tweaked following playtesting feedback. 

Below is shown the progressive iterations on the bakery station where players combine ingredients into ammunition. Regular playtesting allowed us to rapidly address issues with the usability and feel of the bakery to make it more intuitive. 

Another notable design iteration is the ingredient information, which initially overwhelmed the player with all the stats for each component. To address this, I decided to define each ingredient with one word and a complementary image I designed. Some of the effects were a bit tricky to convey, but it was still far more effective than displaying all the numbers.