Lead Producer/Designer
Unreal Engine 5
Alt-Controller, Co-Op, Arcade, On-Rails Shooter
Jan 2024 - May 2024
Created with a Team of 13 People
play the Game for yourself
Summary
Over the course of 4 months, my team worked on Back Off Me Booty, an alternative controller idea I pitched at the beginning of the development cycle. The intended players control this cooperative game using a seesaw rigged with Arduino components.
Back Off Me Booty allowed me to utilize all of the Agile management practices I learned over the past year with areas of game dev I hadn't previously had experience in. This included physical hardware, microcontrollers, animation, and other unique pipelines.
As Lead Producer
Production took up most of my time on Back Off Me Booty because of the larger team size and pipeline setup. I started with setting up milestones, task management, and a social contract prior to the strike team organization. This project gave me the most room to try new team management practices because of its longer-than-usual dev cycle of 4 months. As a result, I tried to implement practices such as two-team standups, weekly art syncs, and backlog grooming sessions. On top of these team rituals and task management, I got the opportunity to help our engineers fix bugs and artists optimize their assets in-engine. Additionally, I implemented the entire sound pipeline from finding the SFX and editing music to balancing and spatializing them in the game.
The idea for a seesaw controller came from many ideas pitched by students and voted on to get developed. I came up with the concept of using a seesaw on a pirate ship to fire at three angles with expo attendees in mind. To add a unique twist and lean into the cooperative aspect of the seesaw, I also pitched a two-screen setup in which each player had a screen behind them. To test this, the team paper prototyped multiple screen setups and different levels of public information. Throughout the project, I selected and implemented different design decisions the team came up with, using Unreal Engine's blueprint scripting language. Additionally, I sat in on art and design meetings and offered guidance and support to keep the design and artistic decisions true to the original vision.
