Wisp

Lead Designer/Associate Producer: Champlain College student project

Wisp is a networked cooperative multiplayer game for young girls and utilizes exploratory gathering of resources in a competitive. Players compete as fairies in teams to score the most points by gathering the most wisps before the end of the night.

Lead Designer/Associate Producer

When our game was green-lit to receive more team members, I stepped back from my producer roles to an extent so the production student added to our team could take over, and focused on my role as lead Designer for the project.

In order to expand the game in complexity I designed power-ups which would give players more variety in their play and two additional game types which still followed the same play patterns. While I designed the basic layouts for our new levels to accompany our new game types, I delegated construction of them to my subordinate designers and focused on tuning the power-ups and balancing the game types.

I consider the project to be success. The local Girl Scouts loved it and all of our peers who played it really enjoyed it once they were engaged.

Lead Designer/Producer

Wisp was my first large team project at Champlain College, as well as my last. All senior game development students were divided into small groups of 3-4 and tasked with putting together prototypes during the fall semester to vie for a second semester of work and a larger team with which to pursue that project during the spring semester following.

During our first semester, I acted as both designer and the producer for our team, organizing meetings, prototyping and documenting mechanics and new ideas, organizing QA sessions to see how they played, and presenting to our professors to argue for the viability of our prototypes.

I believe that there are audiences for any type of game, so I hoped to reach one that was less catered to than most. Wisp aims to create play that can be directly or indirectly competitive and low intensity. Though there are no longer servers on which to play Wisp, it is actually similar in nature to Google’s game, which they had on their home page for Halloween 2018.