GAMEPLAY TRAILER

GAME SYNOPSIS

Snowtoriety is a mobile puzzle game in which the player fires snowballs and ice balls at Christmas-Caroling elves to knock them out.  The game’s goal is to invoke in its players a sense of joy and satisfaction upon eliminating the ever so annoying elven threat. Controls are presented in the touch format. Players tap on the snowman and drag in order to aim their projectiles, of which there are two types. Switching between these two types is simple, and only requires the player to press a button. All the game’s interactions and puzzles are physics based, and thus, players should be able to easily understand the game’s mechanics and solutions. These intuitive design principles allow Snowtoriety to appeal to a broad audience.

Snowtoriety was created over the span of ∼3 months from September to December of 2017 with a team of 5 developers (2 artists, 2 level designers, 1 programmer). We worked on the game 2-3 hours a day, 4-5 days a week, using agile and scrum practices with 1-2 week long sprints. Snowtoriety was developed in Unity.

INDIVIDUAL WORK

-          Game Artist / Scrum Master

-          Responsible for Pre-Production concepting and ideation

-          Responsible for character sprites and their animations

-          Responsible for gameplay assets

-          Consulted on production and game design decisions

-          Introduced new artist into the development pipeline during Alpha sprint

The screenshots below include brief descriptions of my contribution to the game.

GAME SCREENSHOTS

POST MORTEM- TEAM

What Went Well:

·         We became a tight knit group of developers that focused on putting the game first.

·         Communication continually improved over time between everyone.

·         Understanding how to get certain tasks done within the team so that blockers wouldn’t prevent others from being able to do their work. In other words, we supported each other whenever we could.

What Went Wrong:

·         At times we lost the fun in the game by trying to follow what we thought were good ideas for the game.

·         The team was not always on the same page in terms of art or level design, so an outsider could tell there are differences between these in our game.

·         Team arguments over game content could’ve been handled better, and possibly even been taken up with the stakeholder to prevent continued arguing.

What We Learned:

·         How to deal with communication issues between teammates, and making sure that everything is overcommunicated instead of under-communicated.

·         RACI can be very important to follow so that we stay within our skill set, and don’t try to worry about things that we shouldn’t be involved in.

·         Try to follow the scrum process as much as possible to prevent ourselves from crunching so that we can maintain a healthy velocity as we near the end of the sprint.

POST MORTEM - INDIVIDUAL

What Went Well:

·         I gained a good understanding of what it is like working on a team with programmers and level designers for the first time.

·         I have a better understanding now of how to manage time effectively between multiple responsibilities.

·         Coming into Guildhall with a primarily 3D art background, my 2D art skills improved a lot over the course of this project.

What Went Wrong:

·         Work is usually conducted during working hours in the gaming industry, and I am bad about doing work outside of the time frame to make up for work that doesn’t get finished during working hours.

·         The above resulted from poor time management, spending too much time on a single task.

·         Crunching happened almost every sprint because there was such a high demand for art, and we did not cut content early or often enough.

What I Learned:

·         I learned the inner workings of using scrum to organize workflow.

·         I got a better understanding of my own abilities as an artist so that I can better predict how long it will take me to finish a task.

·         I learned more about unity game engine and perforce version control integration into pipelines and workflows.