Tea Time's Over
Unreal
Academic
22 People
Ongoing
Core Tasks:
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Align a large, interdisciplinary team's vision of a game
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Create a highly engaging action-combat gameplay loop
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Create a Roguelike progression system for interesting in-run buildcrafting
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Organize Sprints, Strike Teams, and a Roadmap of User Stores.​
Page In Development
Last Updated: 11/11/24
Overview
Tea Time's Over is my current Junior year game development course project at DigiPen. It's a top down, ability based, fast paced, roguelike based on Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland books, developed in Unreal Engine 5. I serve as the team's Design Lead and Co-Producer, working to lead an interdisciplinary team of 22, specifically in the game's direction and scheduling and planning sprints. I also serve as the team's Combat Designer, both designing abilities, and implementing them using Unreal's Gameplay Ability System. This project is the culmination of my development as a designer, and has taught me an immense amount about leadership and large scale development.
Presentation I used on pitch day, made with 48 hours notice
Hiring
Coming into hiring for the project, I knew that I wanted to center the team around making an action combat game. I also wanted prioritize creating a team with a focus on a relaxed, comfortable work environment, with a high respect for quality.
​With these goals in mind, I pitched my project to the class of around 200 people, interviewed with people interested in the project, and formed a full team with people specializing in the areas we needed to develop a game of this type.​​​
Please Don't Touch Anything
The Stanley Parable
Adventure Capitalist
Ideation
Now that we had gathered the team, we then sought to solidify the high concept direction for the project. I conducted a brainstorming session for the team to build up a massive list of ideas, then sort, vote, and cut the ideas down to a final winner. During this process, we identified that building off of an existing fairytale, mythos, or other story would give us a big leg up for the project, since it would allow us to work off of an existing world, instead of making our own. This would help us by not only minimizing the worldbuilding done in pre-production, but also reducing the cognitive cost of having to teach the player about our world.
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By the end of the brainstorming session, we decided on a game based on the original Alice in Wonderland books.
Please Don't Touch Anything
The Stanley Parable
Adventure Capitalist
Alignment
After deciding on the core direction for the game, I prioritized creating the game's pillars. These would serve as the primary tool to align such a large team to ensure the end product was cohesive. I led a team-wide meeting early in the project to get an idea of what the pillars should center around, then wrote each of them out. I then re-confirmed that what we had ended up with met the team's expectations, and locked in the pillars. These continue to be major drivers in the design of both the art and gameplay.
User Stories + Agile
Moving into the later stages of pre-production, I shifted my focus towards establishing our production methodology. Working off of our other producer's work, and a lecture further expanding on applications of User Stories, I decided to create a User Story Roadmap that has worked incredible well for the team thus far. At the start of each sprint, I update the roadmap based on the current state of the project, the courses requirements, and the team's needs. When doing this I define the user story, completion criteria, and talk one on one with each team member to ensure they understand their goals for the sprint. This roadmap has been pivotal in the team's success so far, and led us to delivering a very solid product for our 2nd milestone without any crunch.
Lessons so far...
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Clear game pillars continue to be an invaluable grounding force, especially with crossdisciplinarity development.
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Great design ideas come from everywhere. Loop the entire team in on brainstorming meetings and important decisions when it's feasible, and you'll end up with an infinitely better product.
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User stories and clear communication of expectations really help keep the train on the rails with large scope projects
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Highly capable teams create dramatically better products than highly skilled individuals.
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Narrative development can provide an incredibly solid backbone to support artists
