Living Megastructure
Technical Designer
September 2020 - December 2020 (4 months) | 6 person team | Unreal Engine 4
Living Megastructure is a third-person, platforming, sandbox game. The player is confronted with challenges presented by the structure: walls too high to scale, gaps too far to jump, and streets unlit for centuries. They collect seeds to grow plants that make platforms, bridges, light sources, food, and serve other functions to make more of the structure habitable to the community they live with.
- I served the team by organizing and guiding our meetings. Due to restricted schedules (~10 hours a week), we had bi-weekly scrums, sprint reviews, and planning.
- Handled the weekly creation and submission of packaged builds to our instructors.
- Guided the team in preparing for meetings and presentations with our instructors: rehearsing, and adding screenshots and text to our level for seamless demonstration of our game and process.
- Designed and used Blueprints to implement two primary systems: planting (including the effects of different plants), and the user interface.
- Contributed to our user surveys with questions targeting the intended player experience.
Product Roadmap
You can click the image or here for the full spreadsheet file. I started creating this file for the team to track our tasks and dependencies over week-long sprints. During each sprint planning, we would make any necessary updates to optimize the value of our work.
Research Document
Describes the design and development process for the entire project, and more specifically my contributions. Summarized:
- Our design and artistic inspirations, including what had been my last team project, Mu and The Little Reef.
- The project's target experience, audience, and design pillars to achieve that objective.
- Design and technical explanations of the planting system and user interface, which were my primary contributions.
- Our testing process and summarized feedback.
- How our work achieved the game's technical needs and design objectives.