About the project:
At the start of the vertical slice course at Uppsala University, I pitched this game to my classmates. The goal with pitching this game was making a great portfolio piece for the entire team (you’ll be the judge of that) while also exploring the second-person perspective. I had already recruited a small team of 5 people shortly before the pitch, with the team growing to a total of 7 students working full-time on the game during the course. Additionally, a sound designer outside the course helped us with sound design and the soundtrack in his free time. Something to note as well is that this is the third project I’ve made with the Chonk Cats Productions team.
The project I pitched at the time was a second-person perspective game in which the player would be tasked with guiding hostages out of an office building. Each hostage would have unique character traits that determine certain actions they may take due to events in the game. Both the multiple hostages and character traits were dropped due to repetitiveness and time constraints respectively. Instead, we ended up focusing on polishing the second-person perspective and the stealth elements as much as possible.
Production took a little less than 8 weeks of work (time limit of the course) after which the game was presented to the public at GGC (Gotland Game Conference) 2023. Here the game received a lot of compliments from the jury and was nominated for both the art design and level design awards.
My work on the project:
As mentioned previously, I pitched this project at the start of the course. At this point I had been mulling over a second-person perspective game for about 2 years and wanted to give it a shot. After gathering the team, I became the Product Owner for the project while also working on the Level Design for the game.
Throughout the entire project, my time was split between my two roles. Days would generally start with me updating documents, Jira tasks or helping people along. After which I would continue working on the level design of the game. In order to convey the game’s ideas and concepts as well as possible. For this purpose, we made use of a Miro board to keep track of each design element of the game. At the same time, we used Jira to keep track and update all the user stories and tasks.
As Product Owner, I oversaw almost all the design choices. Working as a product owner on this project taught me a lot about the clarity of design ideas and how to work together with the team to improve these design ideas. In my role as level designer, it was at times tough to make enough time for my work between my work as product owner. By the end of the project, I had been able to build and playtest two levels for the GGC show floor.
After GGC, we learned a lot about the difficulty of the game and decided to make a few more changes to the game. These were mostly minor changes to improve the clarity and playability of the game. We also made two new minor levels that would replace the original tutorial level, which now became level 1.
I was incredibly happy with the end of the project and its two nominations. The project is currently entering production again during our final semester. I hope to soon be able to update my portfolio with some amazing new updates.
