HouseKeeping

Timeline

Project work started in November 2022 on a team that was meant to consist of two other designers, one of whom was also the creative lead, but after their departures from the team, we had to massively tighten our scope and restructure the group to meet our deadline.

I acted as senior game designer, functioning as the head of a 'design committee.' This meant changes had to be approved as a group, while I acted as a tiebreaker on votes and was in charge of maintaining documentation, identifying issues, and proposing solutions/options for approval. Feasibility concerns were consulted with the producer and lead programmer, and adapting or prioritizing mechanics for their feedback.

Losing two members meant I had to 'design down' the game to prevent scope creep. This constraint, in tandem with a goal towards playtesting early and often (and my own insistence on ABI - Always Be Iterating), let us run through multiple potential mechanics in a short space of time before finally coming to consensus on what would be our pillars.

We started with essentially an inventory management game, where all players were on a single team and it was simply a race against time to complete as many chores as possible by managing tools and coordinating with teammates verbally. It became clear that the more fun aspect would be having something sabotage your progress, and specifically letting other players do the sabotaging, and it was these early tests where the keepers spent most of the time chasing the cats instead of their chores where I knew we had found the main fun sensation to target.

Accomplishments

• Narrowed down initially brainstormed chores into list of features that could feasibly be built.

• Simplified game mechanics from its initial inventory system into a loadout system to class system to a large set of tools and then down to its final form of 4 main tools. This was in response to playtesting feedback of either not being able to parse what items were, or having too many possible uses.

• Pared out unnecessary or non-viable features like remote multiplayer, random mini-games, a time trial mode, and random events.

• Identified a suitable camera rotation and height to work with the isometric view.

• Found a Unity Package for UI - colored outlines indicating team control of chores in the house, scripted system for outlines to 'bloom' in size to indicate player interactability.

• Adapted to players' issues of onboarding by helping build tutorial system, including listing what players needed to know (objectives, teams, controls, UI) and writing onscreen text prompts for said objectives. Also voiced the Boss character delivering said lines.