I led a team of around 10 developers and artists to design and deliver a rythmn game. The goal for this game was for it to be an experience which could replicate an experience from the parks in the comfort of a family's living room. Working with Disney means a lot of restrictions and creative requirements. The three main ones were: we had to use provided footage from a parade, it needed to use phones (android and iphones) as controllers, and players of all ages needed to be able to play.

The project was split up into multiple phases with the first phase being pitching.

Pitching

For this phase I led our conversations with the Imagineers, helping steer us towards a concrete plan that they and the larger development team felt happy pursuing. This required me to pitch several ideas to the Imagineers, explore technical avenues with the developers, and create / test experimental game loops. A lot of this process was about ensuring our path would be focused yet still flexible to iteration, so that also meant setting up our internal development checkpoints / goals while also setting client expectations.

Prototyping

In the prototyping phase I led us to center the game around the experience of, "your favorite character picking you out from the crowd and dancing with them in the parade". I also created the game loop of players using the phone as a sort of parade baton and dancing to specific moves seen during the parade. Players would take turns, performing a string of dance moves, then passing it to another player to perform those same moves with their own twist that must be replicated. These micro dance movements then became the back bone of the experience. With our tech allowing near zero latency and the ability to create a whole library of track-able player movements / input actions we leaned further into this action based design.

Once we had a testable version of the basic game loop we playtested it externally with the Imagineers. Once they approved it was fun and worth exploring we had received the green-light to focus on the rapid process of building out the rest of the experience / honing our design to be even more engaging. With the full more refined game loop and a stronger semblance of the experience fully playable we were then allowed to playtest with our target audience. This playtest didn't go exactly as planned and we found that the game was too complicated for the very young, and the turn order didn't work well with fighting siblings. This required a quick and slight design direction change, abolishing the need for a turn order and requiring me to design a new loop and positive ways for players to interact with each other. These slight changes were made in a week and playtested again, this time with a lot more success and much happier children.

Full Production

Then came phase 2 of development and design iteration. Most of my time during this part was spent refining the player actions. This required that I work with our animators to ensure players understood what to do and what animators should be highlighting, working with the developers to expand our input system and design new dace moves which could give players leeway, while also working with the rest of the designers to ensure these worked within the larger flow and experience. We settled on a repeated rotoscoped animation to signal to players what moves they should be doing, I made sure that these actions were themed and felt natural with the different character moments and film specific motifs. A lot of my time was spent playtesting these actions, yes this involved a lot of dancing in front of my computer.

Since I was focused on the designing the actions the player could perform I also designed the tutorial for the experience, making sure it was understood by the players as well as narrativized in the classic Disney way. Being the lead also helped me design a tutorial which worked to mirror the pacing of the main experience, setting players up to perform in a similar way.

Our game was focused on ensuring that everyone would be rewarded for being creative through dance, so the rhythm component of the game was designed and developed later in the process once we knew our input system / general game loop. I designed the system to not penalize players for being off beat but rather reward players for being on beat. The first build we had with this new feature, the playtesters complained that the system was off beat, but through rigorous testing we found that the game was incredibly on beat and the players were even worse than we expected them to be at keeping rhythm so we made the system even more lenient and aired on the side that players were delayed more than their were early which wound up being the case. This system also played into our new game loop which would give players periods of loose player driven dance segments, between guided dance sections. Using our rhythm tracking system we gave "on beat" actions more fun effects and positive feedback vibrations in the phone. This worked great and didn't explicitly broadcast that certain players were more on beat than others yet rewarded those who were engaging more with the game.

Polishing

Once we had finalized the main interactions for the game and ensure the game loop was fun and compelling I shifted the team's focus to be polishing what we had. This meant a lot of playtesting and bug fixing. During this phase of the project I also worked on a lot on tweaking the player actions for be less lenient in some places and more lenient in others. With this being a linear experience set to a video of a parade with gameplay overlayed we had some limitations on what we could provide in terms of visual polish, so I directed the team to amp up our audio instead. I worked with the rest of the team to source / record, edit, and balance the various new sound effects for the game. These included sound effects for visual effects, voice overs for insructions / move names, and sounds to prompt players to look at or use their phones. This led to a much more rounded out auditory experience which made our game come to life and accomplish a cohesive soundscape.

Throughout the process I also used jira to make sure we stayed on target and scoped. This also allowed us to track bugs more effectively later on in the process and allowed anyone from the wider creative teams to submit bugs when they saw something out of wack.

During this process we also playtested more and more with the target audience, this gave us invaluable feedback, and allowed us to create an experience that really allowed every family member to have fun.

We delivered the game to the client meeting all of the criteria and still was under budget. This included a build for PC, Mac, iPhone, and Android. We gave extensive testing directions, copious documentation about how the game worked, documentation about possible ways to increase in scope / expand the idea for other aspects of the park, and ways for the Imagineers to ask us questions if they had any later on.

I failed to capture the full extent of the work I did, since this was a small team I helped out in near every aspect I could and personally ensured that we hit our deadlines no matter what happened. This project was needless to say, a bit of a blur.