DANIEL SELVIA
Starstruck - May - August 2017
Meteor Men Studios - Lead Producer, Programmer
Genre - Endless Runner, designed for Mobile
Engine - Unity 5
Team Size - 7
Runs on - Android, PC
SUMMARY
Starstruck is a 3D, endless runner set in space with an 80's arcade aesthetic. Collide with asteroids of varying sizes, collecting the mass of smaller asteroids, but losing mass on collisions with larger asteroids. At the end of the road waits a planet whose mass you must exceed to advance. Destroy the planet, spawning in a new track with procedural generated track portions, and another planet to destroy. Earn the highscore and make it to the online highscore board.
RESPONSIBILITIES
Lead Producer
-
Wrote thorough technical design document and game design document
-
Lead group in weekly scrum meetings and digital scrum meetings bi-weekly
-
Communicated regularly with each member of group to determine blocks in pipeline
-
Tracked tasks with HacknPlan using user points as measure of effort
-
Broke down the design into epics, user stories, and tasks
-
Set up backlog of tasks to choose from
-
Presented Starstruck to group of peers
-
Meticulously bug tested
Programmer
-
Set up the Highscore screen database using Microsoft Azure
-
Established communication between database and project in Unity
-
Set up initial prototype with the mass gaining/losing system in place, and score
-
Made dynamic collision camera shake and conveyance of gameplay elements
-
Set up Main menu
DEVELOPMENT
I joined Meteor Men Studios, a team consisting of one tech lead, one art lead, three artists, and myself as producer. We set out to make a competitive score based infinite runner with massive explosions and intense particle effects. Initially I had started by setting up a prototype to confirm that the concept we were running with was what we all felt we wanted. On confirming that I wrote our game design document and the majority of the technical design document.
Throughout the process I followed Kanban principles laid out in a couple of books I had been following along with. Following the methodology laid out in the Kanban book we were able to hit very few road blocks and able to react and address them promptly when we did hit them. I gained a lot of experience working to set up the highscore database, and management experience in how to work most effectively on large groups of diverse skills.