Tale of Umbris
For this game project, I took on several roles in my team. The main one was as a Game producer, I took the leadership role in the group because I'm an enterprise student and to further develop my teamwork skills by trying to help everyone in their respective roles and putting everything together. My second role was to be a programmer, I was the main programmer, focussing on the player mechanics and environment of the level, as well as the UI and core mechanics of the game. My last role for this game was game designer, Norbert and I created the look of the 2 levels of our game and I put them all together in Unity.
01|
Player Creation
For creating the level, I took inspiration from the movement and some of the mechanics of Celeste (Noel Berry, 2018) and Hollow Knight (David Kazi, 2017). The first month of programming was mainly focused on creating the player's movement. I really wanted to have a quick and smooth platformer feel and that the player had full control of the player. The main mechanic for the player's movement is its ability to dash in the direction the player wants. This mechanic took me a long time to implement since it created a lot of bugs in the environment. In the end, I added a trail renderer to the dash to give it a little bit more depth to the player's feel.
For this first movement progress report, the player had some sliding in walls mechanics which are not included in the final version of the game, this was a decision that we choose as a team because the level was going to be all in one plane
02|
Level Design
Level 1 ➡️
For the levels design, we decided to focus on obstacles rather than fighting enemies. We knew that creating a cool 2d combat system takes a lot of time and polishing and it was too ambitious for us. We made the levels in a way that you could speedrun the game making the tempo of the game as quick as possible so the player doesn't waste too much time on the death animations or the transitions between levels. For the first level, we created a jungle that fit the theme within the temple of the light creatures. For this, I created some light obstacles that gave debuffs to the player when on the light. I created some basic platformers obstacles such as falling platforms and falling objects. I created the level in a way of a tutorial, the first part of the level introduces the obstacle 1 by 1 making the player use the dash mechanic and get comfortable with the movement and throughout the level, the obstacles are combined in order to increase the difficulty. For the second level, I decided to make it more challenging with more dangerous traps forcing the player to learn the patrons of certain obstacles in order to avoid them and putting the checkpoint a little further to the right side of the level so the player needed to focus a bit more on not screwing up during the level.
Level 2 ➡️
Background Implementation
For the background of the levels, I created some depth by adding a parallax effect. I discussed this with the art team asking them to create the background with different layers in order to achieve this effect
03|
Menu Design
For the menu, I wanted to make it simple and quick. I just added a how-to-play button which takes the player to a different screen with the controls and a start and quick buttons. In the first draft of the menu, I had a different scene for the different buttons. So when a button was pressed it takes you to a different scene. This was a really inefficient method and if I keep doing this the game would be heavy to download. To solve this problem I discover the disabled option of group canvas option. This didn't require any code and was a lot simpler than the change scene option
04 |
Team Management
I think during the project I evolved as a team leader, at the beginning I was talking to everyone and trying to help them, but at the same time, I was solving all of the problems by myself instead of asking my teammates for help in their respective areas. The team wasn't organized and everyone was confused about what needed to be done. After realizing this issue with my team I decided to schedule a weekly meeting for everyone to give a progress report and discuss what we needed to do for the next weeks, this helped a lot the team dynamic and everyone was more focused on their respective task. One of the biggest challenges I needed to deal with was one of my team members' situations. Because we were 1 less person on the team everyone had more things to do and we needed to rethink how the game would look. This was when I came up with the idea of converting the game into an obstacles-based game and not including enemies since we didn't have anyone to code AI for enemies. We decided as well not to add a boss since It wouldn't fit the game dynamic because the player didn't have the chance to explore the fighting system during the levels.
One of the main features I use to give tasks to all of the team members and check on them was Trello.com I added their respective tasks with different labels and they could check if they've done it or not.
I still have a long way to go as a Game Producer, but overall I learned a lot about managing a team and some ways to keep the team motivated with weekly message and reports on my progress so they could see I was working on the game.