Projects/Games - Sagarika D Rana

Showing 9 Result(s)

Among Us VR

on September 18, 2023September 19, 2023

Among Us VR was a dream project for me. Ever since Metroid Prime 1 came out on the GameCube back in 2002, I’ve been fascinated on how games are able to establish themselves in one genre and then successfully make the leap into a different genre(in this case from a 2D Metroidvania to a 3D First Person Shooter type of game). Among Us VR started as a mobile/steam game that gained international prestige and with that momentum, we were able to carry the game into the immersive world that is Virtual Reality!

Feel free to take a look at the website for this game.

With these leaps, you have certain constraints such as how do you make the new version compelling and fresh without straying away from what fans loved about the original in the first place? How do you use those constraints to push what the franchise can be known for? All of this was discovered, chatted, iterated and worked through implementation for Among Us VR and it was an absolute joy working with such a fantastic team as we worked through all the ups and downs of game development for this title.

Art Production & Day to Day Production

For this title I started with art production that slowly turned into day to day production. Some of my activities included making sure the art team and art director were aware of all feature work other disciplines were working on incase there were any dependencies and/or blockers coming up. This included working with audio and making sure they understood upcoming features and rooms being worked on so their schedule was lined up. I stayed locked step with the art team and documented and ensured all action items were followed up on during our various meetings. I also worked on individual check-ins with each team member to understand needs/blocks/concerns and following up with the lead producer and directors so they’re aware of team health.

I regularly synced with our Art Director to get information on if everyone had what they needed , if there was any feedback they needed eyes on, understanding Jira stories , made sure updates via scrum and other meetings matched what was in Jira. If not, I would sync with team members to make tickets to track work when needed. If there were any concerns on future feature work, especially if they required other disciplines to get that flagged in our high level chats and keep them in mind while in various meetings throughout the sprint. I helped set up next sprints, cleaning up current/previous sprint, pulling over tasks, closing out irrelevant tasks, created buckets for feature work , facilitated sprint breakout rooms and helped set the goals for the sprint with directors input.

It slowly evolved into day to day production which involved running scrum, and running meetings with feature work happening within the team. There were multiple features going on during our sprints so the lead producer and I split which features had our attention.

I worked through the first drafts of presentations for internal stakeholders and helped keep track of risks to bring up for directors. This would help facilitate communication with our internal leadership while giving a platform to discuss any issues for support needed for the team.

Some of the non glamourous work sometimes included managing the oculus backend of who had access to what channel and when but I made sure all important parties knew who had access to what and when, as a staple for our studio’s best practice of keeping track of that effort. I also made sure to update leadership when figuring out some backend issues that caused delays for us testing the network and server side for a large multiplayer game like this.

Multi-disciplinary feature work

There were many types of features that needed to be supported by the multiple disciplines.
Some of which were the large minigame effort that needed to work while networked. This large effort also included the sabotages that were also needing to be networked and working.

We had an understanding of what the sabotages needed to look like but figuring out how that translated into how things would look and feel in VR had some challenges to overcome. My job in this effort was to help timebox the effort, while working with the team to understand the deadlines for decisions, making sure all three disciplines had an understanding on the status of the minigames/sabotages feature and that we were working towards prototypes to test every sprint.

There was also the consideration of performance and if certain minigames were deemed too taxing to attempt or their estimates came in too hot, we would have to drive it.
One system that helped was having a weekly minigame sync with the folks on that feature set. We essentially had a pod structure set up for this effort that reported weekly status updates to stakeholders and clients so everyone understood the amount of progress being made on such a central feature of the game.

QA Processes

For QA we had two rounds, both internal and external to our studio. We worked with META QA to verify the game upheld the standards of the META store and their standard for their apps on their store. This involved going through a second QA while undergoing our internal QA and fixing issues that would prevent up from launching by our deadlines. Often times, this would involve a once a week meeting with external QA leads to understand new bugs coming in and their severity in terms of class. To help manage the multiple bugs being found by both teams, I created a spreadsheet to house all the external bugs, copied them over with their severity and followed our internal QA process to ensure all critical bugs were being prioritized accordingly. Copying over the bugs while tedious was the best workaround to not being able to add internal folks to the external bug board.
During this process we continued to meet with internal QA to help prioritize bugs and the order that they got worked on while keeping the QA team, internal director team, internal stakeholders and external stakeholders up to speed on our bug progress. I was usually the closest person to this effort so I mainly served at that point person and made sure to have the information easily accessible.
Keeping up with the bugs meant have dedicated bug Fridays to work through development bug debt as well as making sure the team understood what to work on. I worked with our Project director to come up with processes to process through bugs per discipline and assign the needed information to tackle them accordingly. All of these bugs are tricky business and with Among Us VR being a multiplayer game, this often meant being available for team members and QA to be an extra body in case they needed more people in lobbies to test out connection/server/loading/whatever else was needed. This led me to some of my favorite work which was just Testing the build

Marketing Support

During our different phases of the project we worked with our internal marketing team to create trailer to hype up the game for various showcases around the world. While I didn’t help organize the 1st and 2nd trailer, I did with the third. This third trailer was our launch trailer and was shown in the META VR showcase. I worked with our external trailer professional, Derek Lieu, to coordinate available people to shoot the trailer, worked with him and our Art Director to make sure we were shooting scenes that were complete and worked through the logistics of getting all parties together for the multiple shoots.
Most of the main marketing support was done with our Lead Producer and I assisted wherever I could to help with that workload.

Playtesting/Testing the Server

A huge effort on our end was actually making sure the servers could handle a BUNCH of people connecting once the game went live. How else could we achieve this but to test, test, test! So off we went to work with an external team to get players access to the builds to test out the game and find any bugs we’ve missed. Of course, as software development always goes, we found some more bugs that we triaged to address and make our launch as smooth as possible. My main effort here to was to coordinate within our team how many people we wanted to test each round, coordinate with this external vendor, get all the emails verified and in the system and play through collecting data. Afterwards we set up systems with our marketing team to monitor our discord for issues players were facing and prioritize those up. In the end our tests proved successful as our launch was smooth. With the team continuing on with patches to add more content and quality of life updates, the game and community is growing stronger every day.

Conclusion

Like I started with, this project was just an amazing opportunity to work with a fantastic team and learn the inner workings on supporting a live multiplayer game. Throughout my career, I’ve worked with small team but I have not had the chance to work with a 25+ person team. Seeing a game transcend its original genre and coming into its own with a successful launch and hearing that we hit 1 millions units sold shortly after launching will always be a highlight in my career. I’m grateful to my Lead Producer, Jennifer Rabbit, for mentoring me, guiding me and propping me up to learn new skills and become a better producer. I’m extremely grateful for my Project Director – Mike T and the rest of my wonderful director group for all the support and wonderful times together.

Silent Slayer : Vault of the Vampire

on August 19, 2023September 19, 2023

Silent Slayer is a horror reverse escape room type of game. This means instead of trying to escape an area by going through various puzzles and traps, you overcome them to venture deeper into the castle. More details to be revealed as we get closer to our trailers and launch!

Take a look at the latest trailer!

Day to Day work

A large part of how I’ve been supporting this team is working through communication gaps between directors, leads and non lead folks on my team. When I was initially brought on, there seemed to be high level vision concerns from the team, and part of my main goal was to help ease any tension and be a conduit for information so that the team understood high level pivots that were coming.

Art Production/Audio Production

Part of my work on this project includes supporting the grander Art team as a whole while making sure they are aligned and in sync with the design features being worked on in our sprints.
I work with my Art Director to make sure all artists have direction, are unblocked and had sprint goals clearly outlined with direction if needed from other disciplines to ensure timely sprint goal completion. If estimates were running over or there were unforeseen issues coming up, I made sure the directors were made aware of these issues and how they might impact our high level schedule.
Part of my large feature support, from concept to final asset delivery including establishing pipelines with external vendors, combining that with our internal processing and updating to fit the needs of our game. There was an effort to get the Vampires through this pipeline that involved 13+ people, ranging from texture updates, rig updates, animation updates and signoffs in between. Though daunting, I worked with the team to establish the workflow step by step and stood up a tracker that we referenced in our daily syncs to ensure we were hitting our timelines for internal stakeholder signoffs.
I take great pride in offloading mental strain by putting everything in a central tracker to visually see where our work is progressing. Having a visual to bring up in our syncs just helps the communication flow easily and while there is a little overhead of keeping this up to date, I believe having a good tracker support Jira is a match made in heaven.

Guiding Feature Work

Part of my duties on this team is supporting Sprint Kick Offs with realistic goals for features. We do this by having a sprint sign off before the sprint starts the following week, with lead buy in and playtest callouts.

When turning over the sprint, we work through standing up the stories in Jira, with goals, leads, supporting staff and directors so the team has one central place for information. When we kick off the sprint, I work with my teams to have an implementation breakdown where we walk through dependencies and high level understandings of what work will be done and when so we can also call out any reviews that need to happen.

Smoketesting

Every week, I coordinate with directors and leads to understand updates and evaluate what can be tested in headset to help stabilize the build week to week. This involves me assessing what progress has been made, what upcoming playtests/VP plays, milestones we should be prepping for and working through an agenda with the team. Once the agenda for playtesting is solidified, I work through testing the build, identifying any bugs, logging them and giving a status report to my director group to see what must be addressed for upcoming important dates.
I do really love working through the game and playing, it gives me the chance to get super intimate with the game, progress the team is making and ask clarifying questions on things that aren’t hitting the mark.

With this information, I am able to give a status update on various parts of the game and speak to stakeholders on status on the fly. Which just instills confidence in the team, in myself and hopefully to our stakeholders!

Playtesting

I work with the playtest coordinator at the studio to work on identifying playtesting goals, design goals, A/B testing, duration playtesting to ensure we are getting user testing feedback on early stage features and pivoting where needed based off of data with our market audience. Smoketesting the build every week ensures we are able to have a stable build for playtesting efforts to help minimize lead time on timely playtests that need a quick turnaround.

Team Show and Tell

Team Show and Tells are meetings in which we work through our updates, every two weeks so that the team has awareness of what other team members are working through. This is usually used as a team bonding, morale booster to see all the great progress the rest of the team has worked on. This also helps form the sense of a team, with people getting to talk about how cool all these updates are and I feel this process just helps solidify the team dynamics. It breaths life into the team by forming more connections, having fun and cracking jokes together, building an actual sense of belonging to people. Its no surprise that people perform better when they feel that sense of ownership, sense of inclusion, sense of building something larger than themselves. Having these feel good moments with the team as a whole just reinforces that cohesion. Without a good team dynamic, there is no project so this type of meeting is super important to me and I take great care to create a warm, safe environment for everyone to shine in <3

VP Plays

Getting feedback from our VPs can be seen as a stressful ordeal but it doesn’t have to be! Part of my work for this team has been working through setting up agendas according to our high level schedule and getting VP feedback to make sure we are hitting the notes that the game needs to deliver on globally. After working through the meetings with the proper stakeholder, I get the notes to the team so that everyone can understand how we are tracking in our high level goals, boost up praise while working through feedback in tangible bites of information for directors to make pivot decisions on.
By keeping everyone on the loop of what is coming down the pipe, we are able to continuously foster open communication and trust amongst the team which will in turn hopefully allow faster turn around speed when we do need to pivot since direction changes won’t be as jarring.

It brings me great joy to compartmentalize the feedback into actionable bits that will go through our established feedback process pipeline and then also bring all praise to the team members directly. Everyone likes to feel like they are doing a good job and reinforcing the good feels directly to team mates solidifies trust, team bonding and a sense of hitting our intended vision! All great things to continue to foster on a team rapidly working through our features and schedule!

While this title is still in development, I hope to share more details and hopefully add more pictures of fun moments I had with the team 🙂
If there are any questions, please feel free to email me!

Lost Recipes – An Educational VR Cooking Game

on February 23, 2023February 23, 2023

Lost recipes is an education VR cooking game where you are able to cook traditional recipes from three different places, while learning about the cultural relevance in a fun, easy to digest way. Although most cooking games are chaotic and silly, the tone of this game was intentionally set to be a nice and relaxed experience focusing on learning how to cook ancient recipes that don’t usually get the attention or care they deserve.

You can check out the website, including a recipe book at this link.

Great strides were made from the Project Director and Design Director to make this game as authentic as possible and through a long process, we were able to get authentic voice actors for all populations represented here.
Great care was taken to make sure the interactions felt good, and that the instructions made sense and players were able to follow along while having time to listen to narrative beats.

My contributions for this project were helping with the day to day, running scrum, following up on UI features within the team, gathering information for feature/team health and sending that over to the director group. As I was new to the studio and new to working with such a huge team, my beginning on this project was following up on simple stuff as I

continued to learn studio processes and becoming situated to my new environment. Towards the end of my time on the project, I helped run through bugs, speaking to the directors about risks I’ve worked through with the team and making sure things were on pace and syncing all information to the lead producer. It was also quite fun working on team celebration and team bonding events as well, my favorite was coordinating and cooking a recreation of one of our recipes in the studio, Tanghulu.

Art Production/Audio Production

One of my main responsibilities was helping the audio team work with the engineering team to implement all of the collision work going into the game. We tried not to get too heavy into physics but still have enough where objects made sense while playing and interacting with each other. The studio at the time used Wise for creating the sound systems within the game and hooking that in. But the infrastructure needed to be updated with some more best practices, trimmed and fit if you will. I tuned in with the audio dailies to ensure things were on track with our high level schedule, making sure to keep the director group and lead producer up to speed on all developments. If the audio team more tech support for certain updates, I made sure to create that action item and follow up on it with the appropriate parties. I also followed the UI effort for this game closely and worked through any flags needing to be raised for support up the chain of command.

QA

This was my first taste of QA at the studio . I spent my time working with the team during bug fixes and a good chunk of QA learning their process and making sure bugs were organized and assigned to the correct people. I also spent a good chunk of time playing the game and noting issues that I found and documenting them as well.
One of my favorite bugs was the infinite sparkle bug haha

Conclusion

I learned a lot about managing a large team, how to keep track of multiple features going on at the same time and working through pipelines that needed some iteration and more work to get to an ideal place. I’m thankful for the team that allowed me to learn and grow with them and I’m thankful for QA for showing me the ropes 🙂

Center on Violence Against Women and Children Educational Games

on May 21, 2021May 25, 2021

In Collaboration With: Center on Violence Against Women and Children

Project Date: Fall 2019

This game was created as a roleplaying activity to help students better understand how to help survivors of economic abuse. Students roleplay as a social worker to recognize signs of economic abuse and learn about the resources that are available to help. There were 6 total games made for this department. The ones shown are what I have permission to share.

As you can see in the gif, we had a simulation type game where the students would role play as the counselor talking to Lina to help her. This was part of a class module where students learn what economic abuse is and how to talk and engage with the survivors. Your goal is to work with Lina and properly converse with her so that she starts to trust you. After you’re able to gain her trust, she will start to disclose a few instances of certain types of behavior. You as the student would identify these behaviors as different types of abuse and gently guide her to understand the resources available to her.

The game puts the player in the seat of the counselor. Watch what you say, because any inappropriate or incorrect answers will diminish Lina’s trust in you. If the trust meter runs out, Lina will leave and you would have failed to help her.

This game serves as a simulation so students can put their skills to the test. These skills would have been cultivated in their course work. This game is a practice run and signifies the importance of professionally watching what we say, how we say it and the impact it may have on the recipient.

My role in this game was mostly as helping our lead game designer with scripts, gathering content from our stakeholders, fixing formatting, testing, fixing alignment, and support. This was while I was still a new as a junior producer and level designer.

I loved helping our lead with anything that they needed during development and often help chase down our clients for sign off on different scripts. I also worked marketing this game to different departments at Rutgers New Brunswick as well as Rutgers Newark.

This was my first taste of working on a serious game. It really opened my eyes to what kind of topics games can cover and underlined the importance of fine details and how they make the player feel. It was a great learning experience for me while I was young in the industry.

ARbor Trail

on May 21, 2021June 1, 2021

In Collaboration With Rutgers University Inn and Conference Center

Project Date: Fall 2019

Project Summary

This game uses Augmented Reality technology and physical markers to bring attention to and teach people about features on the trail behind the Rutgers University Inn. Using the mobile app, users can scan the physical markers to answer trivia questions and learn about the wildlife and history of the trail. Great care was taken to: map out the historic trail, highlight rare plant life, create and plant non-invasive signposts. The signs naturally act as waypoints, guiding you through the trail and showing you the borders of the play area. We thought that having a fun new way to learn about the plants on the trail using AR technology would be a driving force for players to continuously to explore and learn. Having to be at the location to play the game was a decision made to drive traffic to the Inn and its Trail.

My involvement

This was my first time starting up a project from the concepts and prototyping stage. We had a nebulous goal of bringing awareness to the recently restored historic trail. Through a lot of brainstorming and playing with different technologies; we settled on using the Unity and Vuforia engines for AR recognition. My main tasks were assembling the team together to work on this project. I outlined goals and requirements as specified from our clients. I worked closely with our stakeholders to explain our research and development during the early prototyping phases. I was in charge of keeping the clients up to date with our weekly progress as well as relaying the wants and needs expressed in working meetings to our development team. As our clients were more milestone-oriented, this allowed the development team time to work on their craft while I took care of the outward-facing, time-consuming parts of working with the clients and making sure they were happy and listened to. I thoroughly enjoyed working and bouncing ideas for the storyboards, flow and story for the game as well.

One of our clients also acted as the “plant expert” and had a team of ecology students working to draw plants, verify plant locations and information and guide our design choices. All in all, I made sure things were running smoothly, all the information was getting passed around properly, and deadlines for open houses were realistic and attainable. This was tracked with different Kanban boards, development boards, Excel spreadsheets, and with our project management tool: Asana. I also worked as QA for the images we used for the AR recognition, I ended up editing some images to make sure the engine could use them. I was also in charge of research, development, and prototyping all of our physical signposts. I communicated updates to the stakeholders for their open houses and arranged events around the app so we could get students to playtest the app for us. I also managed the student workers that were working on this project with us. All of the wildlife and plantlife art was done by the stakeholder’s student workers. I also managed their schedule and art delivery schedule for the team.

A lot of thought and care was put into the physical components of the project since, without them, the game would not function. Since the trail was outside, the physical sign markers needed to be resilient to the elements. I worked with our makerspace and subject matter experts to chose a material that was affordable but resilient to the outside. We tested materials from different types of stones to metal to wood. Our prototypes went from laser printing a design on metal, to laser cutting stone (not pictured), to finally UV printing treated cedar wood with our color design. Keep in mind, I did not have any experience using this machinery, so I spent time learning these machines, researching our options, speaking to craftsmen for advice, researching what national parks do for their trail signs, to make this happen. After a lot of back and forth with our stakeholders, and after a lot of iterating and fine-tuning, we settled on the treated slabs of cedarwood. Cedarwood is resilient against rot. I also found that sealing it with a polyacrylic spray protected the panel from everything, including water! Not only did the UV printer protect the design against the sun, but it also could be printed in our own makerspace at the rate of 10 minutes per sign. The print was also high detail, which is critical in making sure the phones could be picked up by the app and functional. The signposts that go in the ground were also another factor. After all, we had a limited budget. I not only had to weigh the budget costs with our stakeholders for the development of the game but for the physical markers as well. With me learning a lot of woodworking skills and all of the machines in the woodshop/metal shop, I was able to cut costs down by buying raw materials in bulk and then mass producing and treating all the wood in house. I got the process down to a science at the end of it and now how a full set of woodworking skills, metal skills and UV printing skills to show for it.

Managing this project. Below are screens of assets management, project management I was responsible for upkeeping and making sure all the pieces of development were moving properly. I made sure to track issues, assets from our student workers and my own progress for the physical parts of the project. I also have an email I sent to keep track of some tasks.

Project Management using Github.

Final thoughts

This was an extremely fun project. I got to learn so many neat skills while working on this project and I loved working closely with all members of the team. This was a huge undertaking for our department and the final product couldn’t have been achieved if we could not work so well together. There were times where I was stretched a bit thin but as a team, we were able to work together to fill in the gaps. With all of the moving pieces happening, between the physical parts of the project, managing student worker schedules, needing to prototype and test out materials for signposts, keeping the stakeholders up to date, and keeping the parts of the team up to date with everything, I’m glad we got to take a breather once this goal was achieved. The stakeholders were happy and we’re looking to add more content and updates to the app in the future. I also got to push my time management skills to the test with all of these moving pieces on the project. Again, great thanks to the team for pulling this all together.

Tumultuous Absence:26th Annual New Jersey Book Arts Symposium Virtual Gallery

on May 21, 2021May 26, 2021

26th Annual New Jersey Book Arts Symposium
Virtual Gallery Powered by Rutgers GRID

Project Date: Fall 2020

Project Summary

How does the oldest running book symposium in the country innovate and adapt in the age of COVID-19 and it’s social distancing regulations? Rutgers GRID worked closely with NJBAS to make sure the challenges of gathering during the pandemic were overcome by creating the virtual art gallery.

Thoughtful design decisions were made to highlight each of the 30+ artists, and the 100+ artworks in the exhibit appropriately. The layout of the exhibit gave each artist their own breadth of space, while inviting visitors to explore and discover each one.

The Rutgers GRID Virtual Worlds technology allows the community of artists, students, faculty and guests to comingle in the 3D environment; while using 3D emojis, text, and voice chat to communicate.

The multimedia presentation of photos, videos, and 3D rendered artworks allows visitors to experience each of the complex art objects in unique ways.
The virtual world feels like an art gallery through the use of environmental design and storytelling – from the treatment of the gallery wall text, to the guestbook on the wine and cheese table. You can even make the exciting decision of how to customize your avatar for the big night at the reception!

My involvement for this project was as the project manager and producer. As a project manager, I gathered all the requirements together in scoping documents and worked with the designers to influence the layout and possibilities of the project within the constraints of their tight deadline. Once the project started off properly, I stepped aside and worked as support. Making sure our developers were getting all the content on time, and assisting in any way I could. This included gathering the pictures for the art works, editing them into workable objects for import, creating vision boards for the layout, and ensuring that all timelines were followed through. I also maintained communications between all stakeholders and members of the team.

One challenge we faced as a team was directing the final project to a scope that would be feasible given their short timeline. We are a small team and often have a few projects ongoing at the same time. Being strict with the clients on what would be possible was challenging in that we always strive to put our best work out there. Anyone directing projects can understand that this means…scope can get out of hand. Working with 30+ artists for over 100 artworks meant being extremely on top of content deadlines as well as having hard discussions of cutting out certain content. It’s part of the job, and it doesn’t get any easier since we always like to go above and beyond with our work.

Voorhees Mall XR Campus Tour

on May 20, 2021June 1, 2021

Learn about the facilities, and build your virtual campus at Voorhees Mall, Rutgers University.

An Extended Reality Experience designed for the SCUP conference at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, March 16, 2020.

For this project I started off with project intake. This consisted of understanding the clients needs and assisting scoping this into a feasible project with the main outsourced development team. Originally we set out to work as support for a different development team. I coordinated with our two dev teams as well as our department heads and main stakeholder. Midway through development, the original development team was no longer available to work on this project. Afterwards, my team and I set out to rescope the game with our own vision and timeline.

I mainly focused on support for our main developer, pitched ideas for game design and flow. Meanwhile I acted as the voice of the team to our stakeholder. During the tight timeline of this project, there were requests to change the scope of the project so I focused on client management. I acted as a shield for our development team so that they were able to work in peace and focus on their craft while I mitigated potential issues with client and other art teams. I also aided in creating the AR recognized images as well as working on the messaging for the website. I also worked on QA for this project as well as testing. Towards the end of the project, I also helped market this out to the grander Rutgers Community.

I kept the development of this project on our timeline and on the path to finish using different boards for development. I used Github as a project management tool to track tasks, issues and any outstanding feature requests.

During development of the project, especially after development shifted to us, I made sure to schedule weekly scrum meetings to keep all tasks on time.

Unfortunately with Covid-19, the expected launch for this event-based game was disrupted. We have since converted this to a game where attendees could download the cards and play from home.

The most challenging part of this project, was the tight timeline and the client management portion. The project was switched over to our team with the deadline 3 weeks away. The team hustled and switched gears extremely quickly. I used Github, a bunch of in person meetings and whiteboards to track and make sure every piece was working properly. This was a very hectic and chaotic development period but we were able to pull it together as a team, I was able to listen to the team and their needs and step in where ever I could to make sure things were running properly.

Food/Nutrition Games : Parts of a Plant, Dairy Game and Nutrition Game

on May 20, 2021May 21, 2021

In collaboration with the Department of Family and Community Health Sciences at Rutgers University.
Dates : December 2020 – May 2021

Summary of Project
These games are for teaching food and nutrition to kindergarteners. Each game deals with a specific food group or nutrient source. Featured are Skelly’s Search for Dairy , Parts of a Plate, and My Plate.

My contributions and lessons learned

Great care was taken for designing these games. From initial concepts and making sure the game design reflected the intended learning objectives; to using voice acting and dyslexia accessible fonts so everyone could follow along. Since we were designing for such a young age group, we wanted to make each game as visually appealing and as simple as possible to follow along. We worked with our clients asking them “How can we make things easier for the kids? Would this make it easier to understand? As teachers, what have you seen works best in certain lessons?”. As game designers and instructional designers, it is always wonderful hearing fellow teacher on their best practices and how they incorporate them into their lessons. We also understand the importance of education UX design and providing a clean vision of what this game hopes to accomplish. We end up learning from each project as well, something my department and I value very highly.

As the Project Manager, I started off the project by keeping regular meetings and communications between the our team and the stakeholders. Using the intake forms I created for our department, this later progressed into post it boards to simplify the main concepts of each game. After managing the client expectations for these projects, I worked with the main developer for these games to create a timeline for content deadlines. Afterwards, we created storyboards for each game. I facilitated the pitch meetings and pitched my own game, and then created the statement of work contract after we got the buy in.

I specifically worked on the game design, storyboards and game flow for the Dairy Game outlined below. I also created a few of the art assets for this game in designing tool “Procreate”. I also handled the audio direction by talking to our Audio team. The game features voice acting so that the intended audience can follow along. I voice acted for the Dairy Game as well as the other two games. I wrote a few lines of dialogue for each game, as well as recorded and edited the clips for our developer to use for the final game.

For Parts of a Plant, and Nutrition Game, I acted more like a Project Manager. I ensured client communications were kept up during the development, voice acted and edited audio, the audio boards and directions were also plotted out on vision boards. I also dealt with communications when our timeline was not going to be met, and we had to delay the game due to staffing issues and furloughs due to Covid. The rest of my involvement was shielding the development team from any other projects so they could focus on this project. Being able to communicate the delays and issues we’ve encountered, as well as miscommunications with the stakeholders was also a bit challenging. It’s always difficult to deliver the bad news but clear communication is always valued over uncomfortable talks. However, this gave the chance to work on these issues as a team and give recommendations straight from our developers. I found that ensuring that the developers have a voice and are present to showcase their work not only boosts their mood from the praise we would receive but also boost morale to put our best foot forward on these games.

Ending thoughts

It’s always difficult to feel like you failed or make mistakes. But that means there are places for improvement. It shows that I have tried to accomplish something. Small obstacles in a project can be overcome as long as I have the support of my team. Having some communications issues with the client to narrow down the scope was an issue overcome by talking things through with the team, producing visuals and making sure the clients’ needs were heard and understood. The rest of development was smooth sailing after hitting a small rough patch.

These games are extremely sweet but unfortunately are private at the request of the client. Screens and showing the behind the scenes have been approved.

Quest for Wellness

on May 20, 2021June 1, 2021

Project Summary: Help the students on their quest for wellness.

This is an orientation game designed for students to become familiar with campus locations, activities and resources. The main request was so that any incoming student could understand the services available to them.

In Collaboration With:Rutgers University-Newark Health & Wellness Unit, Division of Student Affairs

This was one of my favorite projects to work on. Not only did I manage client communication, I also did the following : sound design, wrote scripts for the characters, voice acted and directed our voice actors, edited the recordings, came up with story dialogue with our lead designer, pitched the dating simulation mechanic, came up with the dating sim stats, QA, testing, and minor game adjustments. I have also annually worked on updates for this game since information and services change. I have taken care of billing and have stayed as a point of contact for any support for our wonderful clients.

My involvement from the beginning was setting up the Statement of Work with our stakeholders. Once the project was scoped out, and our design document was created, we started on development. I make sure the scoping document is created by either doing it myself or working collaboratively with my teammates. While our lead game designer went to work creating the art assets, we bounced around ideas on how to make this game feel more personal. I pitched an idea of adding dating sim stats to the students to make them more fun and more real. The idea stuck and our clients loved the idea. I worked out the different fields for each character, and worked on what they could say to make them feel relatable. if you scroll down, you can see a smart young lady, majoring in Neuroscience, talking about not being able to afford food because of needing to buy textbooks. I have had that exact thing happen in college, especially as I continued on to higher lever courses which required new textbooks. I hope that making a relatable character would stick in the minds of the students playing. If they find someone in a similar situation, hopefully they would remember this game and remember the food pantry! We made sure to come up with relatable stories for each of the characters and making sure we aligned with what the clients wanted as well.

The voice lines and voice acting came as a late addition since we were pulling ahead of schedule and we had the time to add more features to this game. I found it quite enjoyable writing out scripts for the characters and finding people to voice them. Editing and fine tuning audio was new and challenging but I felt significantly cooler after taking this part of the project on. I also found great joy in working with our lovely voice actors and directing their motivation and background for each line. I think it made a difference in the final audio. I also searched for

All the small touches, and feature additions to this project made this super fun and collaborative. I loved directing voice actors, coming up with scripts and having the creative freedom to come up with light hearted additions to the game. The most rewarding aspect of this project is the feedback we got from students who played the game. I believe we got over 2,000 plays and with our feedback survey, we were able to see students’ comments.