My roles: Team Lead, Producer, Concept Designer, Programmer
Engine: Unity3D
Single Player game
Timeframe: 6 months
Release: 2015
Nith21 is a first person shooter with roguelike elements wherein the objective is to get as far as possible by without dying. The game consists of a sequence of randomly generated rooms, and after killing all of the enemies in a room, the player is presented with three different doors. The player does not know what type of room lay behind each door, but they do know the difficulty of each room, as it is denoted by the colour of the burning lanterns next to each door. The player may choose to go in any of these three doors. Naturally, the chance for survival is greatest in easier rooms, but the value of rewards and drops is also significantly lower than that of those in a hard room. The game also features an array of weapons for the player to find and improve through special upgrades. The arsenal ranges from small arms to high-tech assault rifles and grenade launchers.
I was heavily involved with all development phases of this project, and I came up with the concept and pitched it to my team and lectures. Both parties liked the concept. I set up the GDD and iterated it in cooperation with the designer during the preproduction phase. On several occasions, I made executive decisions about the art style of the game as there was a clear difference between the skills of the artists. In addition, I prepared a UML schematic with the lead developer of the project.
My programming tasks consisted of coding gameplay interactions, such as the functionality of the weapons and the spawn system of enemies. I took my role as the team lead seriously, and I tried to get the most out of the project and my team, many members of which had this as their first project. Therefore, I had to handle a wide variety of different opinions of my teammates, and I saw it as my responsibility to encourage them to collaborate and to let them make compromises in a group setting.
The project was not always smooth sailing for everybody, and occasionally problems popped up. In these cases, I would take the time to talk to that person and see what could perhaps be done to solve the problem. Because I took this proactive stance towards the project, I could estimate where eventual issues would likely arise during development, which gave us an edge to timely respond to risks and mitigate them before they became a problem.