Wisp
Wisp was a senior capstone project at Champlain College with artists, programmers, designers and producers competing together for the privilege of further development of their projects. I learned about developing in teams, focusing on team strengths and prioritization, which is the basis for how I work in teams.
Platform: PC
Engine: Unity 3D
Production Period: 8 months (September 2013-April 2014)
Team Size: 12
Role: Design Team Lead, Producer(first 4 months), QA Lead
Project: Rapid prototype a game, pitch it, put it through the paces with professors (exec producers), get green-lit, take on new team members. Finish the game in 4 months.
Tools Used: Unity 3D, Word, Powerpoint, Maya, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, and Redmine
Lead Designer
As the lead designer on the team, I was responsible for the original prototype for wisp, maintaining the master design document, tuning the base mechanics of the 3 game types, tuning power-ups, creating the base level design for the three final playable levels of our game and selling our product to our professors as a viable game.
3 Game Types
There are 3 game types which I played a primary role in designing and balancing, all of which are loosely based around the same mechanic of collecting wisps(collectibles) from the level and returning them to a point while using special power-up wisps to collect more effectively or gain more points upon return to base:
Gather
In the gather game type, two opposing teams attempt to collect as many wisps from the level as they can and return them to their base without losing them to the other team to make sure their team has the most wisps at the end of the match.
If you’re interested in reading more about our development, you can read it here:
Shepherd
In the Shepherd game type, teams collected wisps similarly to the Gather gametype. However, in Shepherd, there was a giant wisp moving on a track between the two bases and players could feed wisps to the giant wisp or deposit them at their home base. Players would have to feed wisps to the giant wisp in order to get it to move toward their base.
Original design sketches for each game type
When the giant wisp reached a base, the match would end and the team whose base it reached would gain a large amount of wisps added to their score, and that team would usually win due to a higher score. If the time limit for the match was reached before the giant wisp reached a base, the team which had deposited the most wisps into their base would win.
Night Light
This game mode was all about gathering as quickly as possible as one giant team. All wisps were gathered to be deposited at the same place in order to maintain a constantly depleting reservoir of wisps. As the reservoir emptied, the lights in the level would dim. If the reservoir was totally depleted before the end of the time limit, everyone would lose. Otherwise, at the end of a game, players would be ranked by their contributions to victory.
Level Design
Each game type also had its own custom level. As lead designer, I determined many of the high level details in our level designs, as well as the ways our different game types would work. Then I would pass off my sketches and ideas to one of the other designers on our team who then built out the level and were in charge of making sure it had appropriate art and followed our design standards.