The goal for this project was to create a game that would communicate a product of another culture to children (specifically, elementary schools students). After going over a few possible traditions of other cultures, we ended up choosing the practice of hunting with eagles--similar to falconry in that a hunter uses a bird companion to find and take down game. From the beginning, I figured that the player would control the eagle rather than the hunter. As the overall concept formed, other questions would be filled in: how do you win? By capturing enough animals. What should the area of play be like? Modeled after the Mongolian mountain range, with animals randomly spawning at various points on the map. How do we make hunting more challenging or invigorating? Different animals to catch with different point values, a timer, higher point quotas with scarcer animal spawns.

Other important details that had to be ironed out quickly included how we would teach the player about the real life practice through the game. We decided that a simple learning-by-doing approach was right for our equally simple game; the practice would be taught in the game's tutorial alongside the core gameplay loop, which would reinforce the ideas behind the practice. We also thought of including fun facts about eagle hunting in between levels, when there was supposed to be an in-between section where you could upgrade your eagle. Both of these were cut for time.

I was one of two game designers on the team. My fellow designer, Carter Roughton, and I each contributed about half of the design documents. Carter most likely did more design work overall due me splitting my time between production work and design. While he worked on the main design document, I created the visual design document. He created the tutorial and wrote the script in conjunction with our team's programmer, Kele Fireheart, while I blocked out and implemented the user interface while working with our team's artist, Alex Sweet. Kele and Alex ended up influencing the game's design themselves with their scripting and assets--designing and implementing the scoring system for the game ended up being a group effort between the four of us. One of my solo pieces of work was the Level Design Document, which was meant to be used by us designers and our artist in tandem to quickly design new level geometry. (Unfortunately, it wouldn't end up being followed due to a misunderstanding between artist and programmer leading to the levels only being open boxes with no geometry inside them that we had to roll with due to lack of time)

Due to not having a production major, I was assigned to be the team's producer as well. This meant I was the one recording and documenting our meetings, managing our tasks and hours worked through Jira and reminding my fellow team mates of goals and priorities to keep us all on track. I also had to be in regular communication with each of my other 4 team mates, but with two meetings a week on average, that was fairly easy. Finally, I was responsible for keeping our game's Confluence wiki up-to-date and professional looking. You can look through it here.

As producer, I also was the one to set up (and would coincidentally conduct) playtesting sessions for the game. We tested the game three separate occasions (as seen on the left) with a total of 21 playtesters. Along with input from the team, I created forms for each testing build and did my best to ensure that we had milestone builds of the game to bring into each testing session. Unfortunately, every build of the game was unexpectedly broken in some way that hampered what feedback our testers were able to give us (the week we wanted to test the music, the music didn't play; the week we wanted to test the tutorial, the tutorial was broken and soft-locked players, etc.). Regardless, we worked around it and managed to get some insightful feedback on things such as presentation, understanding of mechanics and topic, user experience issues and plenty of bugs.