MARAUDERS FAST PACED BRAWLER GAME (XBOX)

PROJECT Year: 2014

Marauders is a Xbox brawler game where players have to battle each other and win objectives in a separate piece of spacetime that have begun forming on different parts of the world. The objective: To be the first that gets back in sync with time to close the spacetime bubble in order to escape with the spoils!

The project was initially created by fourteen students during their fourteen week long minor course of their college. Students from more than five studies joined in a group of 4 branches: Marketing, Art, Design and Development.

My role was to lead the design team. I chose this role to challenge myself in my competence of leadership, not in a technical sense (architecture) but in the creative side of things (design/development). I led and directed a group 2 designers and had to work closely with all the (especially leading) members of the team to make sure the design vision was implemented correctly ,the game was fun to play and balanced.

COMPETENCES

  • Leadership
  • Creating userstories and projections
  • Designing worlds, characters, lore and gameplay
  • balance and testing

PROCESS

Within the project, an agile mindset was used. We opted have a group for each competence. One team for development, design, art and marketing. Each had a leading figure, which made a team of five with a producer. User Stories were made and each team made a backlog. Each backlog was spread over a two week basis. After two weeks a review was made and a prognosis of the upcoming weeks we still had left.

After about six weeks of design and development the first game was alpha tested. A pretty harsh review: unfinished art and bugs, but the game also needed to be more intuitive, provided of more feedback and missed some gameplay fun. The three latter is what we focused on. An example was the implementation of A rotating heartbeat that showed health and was an interaction hitbox at the same time. We also made an effort on creating unique objectives for each world and adding a special weapon as a bonus for the winner of the objective.Ten weeks into development we started testing on a weekly basis, sometimes even twice. We did this cause we wanted as much feedback from the user on the intuitivity, intractability and learnability of the game.

At our launch date party we released a polished game, that was enjoyed by the crowd and reviewed by the course with a eight as grade.