Ryan T. Miller

Purpose:

Demonstration of skills in a team environment

Description of Game:

Stylized Indie First Person Puzzle Game

Team Setup:

1 Producer, 5 Programmers, 5 Artists, 2+ Sound Engineers

My Role:
Programmer / Designer

Tools I Used:

Unity 3D 4+, Maya 2013-2014, GIMP, Excel, Git, Asana, and lots of communication

My Contribution to the Project:

I worked with our producer to establish a schedule and development pipeline, initially, leading the other programmers in their tasks and helping manage the code side, as well as fixing our code-base from the Game Jam and making the FPS controller more stable. 

After my availability dwindled (due to going into Final Project at my University), I took a Designer role and led design discussions about the project while the more available programmers carried on with the coding.

In August, I will be be active in Programming this game again, and will update what tasks I attended to at that time.

Thoughts on the Project:

I was extremely excited to continue working on this idea after the Game Jam. A couple of days after the Game Jam we assembled together Bit Flag Studios proper with a collection of artists, programmers, and a producer.

During my time working on this project so far, I have learned a lot about adjusting a pipeline based on the needs and abilities of my team mates, and I also have learned more about the essence of fun, realizing that when you are using a tool like Unity, there is no need to "plan" the fun of the game; take a good concept, prototype a few things, and see what makes people smile. Once you have that, you have a good starting point for a game.

We have gone through several iterations of the game, redefining what the game was about based on player feedback each time. We dug for the core of our game, and now that we have found it, have set about polishing it.

We realized that the puzzle aspect (akin to Antechamber) was not something our team was capable of with our mentality of letting everyone help design the game. Puzzle games based on figuring out the trick to the puzzle usually require a single vision holder, or at the least, a small handful of well-cooridinated designers; whereas we function with many team members who all would like to have input on level design.

That being said, having more of a focus on the actions of solving the puzzle itself (timed jumps, physics based puzzles, etc) was where we were strong and could allow each person to take a toybox of implemented ideas, and craft different levels that fit together. So, that is what we are currently focusing on.