OTHER DISCIPLINE WORK

This page details my work in disciplines besides production. For further information on the projects I have worked on in my primary role as producer, or projects in which I have applied some of my interdisciplinary skills, please refer back to the Home page.

I singlehandedly created audio landscapes for 2 projects, from designing a direction to implementing and mixing.

I always strive to learn something new about additional parts of game development, with audio design being the best example of this. My experience with audio was nonexistent before picking it up for a project in the second year. Despite this, I managed to design the audio direction, create the full audio landscape, implement sound assets into Unreal Engine, and provide the audio mix for two projects by the end of the year. All of these feats were accomplished on my own using tools such as FMOD and Audacity, without assistance from additional audio designers for any part of the process. This was done despite audio being a secondary role for me on both of the projects, with me functioning primarily as level and system designer on one, and producer on the other.

Video showcasing the audio landscape for This is IGAD! All audio for the game was created by me, with the exception of the music, which was composed by Christopher Bandura.

An excerpt from a level I designed for Spirit of the Totem, a small puzzle-platformer prototype focused on throwing a totem that spawns a second character to control. In this level, the player is being taught how to throw and retrieve the totem, and is shown how pressure plates work.

I have created levels for three distinct genres across four game projects.

I have designed levels across four distinct projects throughout my four years of IGAD, each with their own unique requirements and genres. My experience primarily encompasses level design for puzzle and platforming games, often combining my knowledge of the two for various puzzle-platforming projects. Next to this, I have designed my own Unreal Tournament map, giving me experience in FPS map design. My main strength lies in creating cohesive onboarding levels for new players, exploring each of the game's mechanics in organic ways without handholding. This is visible in projects such as Spirit of the Totem - a small puzzle-platformer made in two weeks by a team of 9 - for which onboarding levels I created were praised by key stakeholders, as well as used to showcase the game to said stakeholders during our concept pitch.

I have implemented my own features with visual scripting across various projects.

Throughout multiple projects, I have done various forms of basic visual scripting (blueprinting) in Unreal Engine. My work in blueprinting primarily includes UI/UX implementation, audio implementation, level blueprinting, and gameplay implementation, the former of those mostly through experimentation in my free time. As a producer, I felt it imperative to understand scripting in order to more adequately work together with programmers, technical artists and tech designers. I have been able to do just that through working on my visual scripting skills, giving me a better understanding of how to read code, understand the jargon, and estimate/review programming tasks.

Trailer for It's Not Rocket Science!, another small prototype created by the team of Spirit of the Totem. I did a majority of the UI design and implementation work for the game.

Here you can see a pie chart of our bugs per status for Muscle Magic. Across both the Closed and Done statuses, more than 80% of the bugs in the project were resolved in the end.

I have championed game quality across multiple large-scale projects as a QA Manager.

As a producer, I have always strived to maximize the quality and success of any game I work on. Therefore, as an extension of production work, I have served as QA manager on various projects throughout my four years of IGAD education. Each of the projects featuring this mix of production and QA responsibilities were large-scale, multi-disciplinary endeavours, each with their own unique KPI's and stakeholder expectations. I was responsible for QA planning and pipeline creation for all of these endeavours, as well as managing build reviews and communicating QA results to key stakeholders. Through my integration of QA with production, every project has remained devoid of major issues, with the 80+% fix rate on bugs for Muscle Magic across two major game platforms being the crowning achievement.

I have marketed major IGAD game releases at high-profile events and across multiple social media platforms.

My mission as a producer is to deliver a high-quality, well-performing product. A large part of the success of any product is marketing, an aspect of development that is hardly covered in our school. This has given me cause to actively take up these responsibilities myself as an extension of production, developing my capabilities in marketing and event planning in the process. Muscle Magic is again the crowning achievement in this regard: through my marketing strategies and understanding of the market we were occupying, we managed to land both a booth at Dutch Comic Con - a feat not previously achieved for any BUAS student game - and a spot at INDIGOx in the Unreal Indie Zone. Not only that, but my efforts to market the game via social media and Steam in combination with these events netted us a total of 7000+ downloads on PC and a click-through rate on Steam of 10.8%, about 8% higher than the usual average.

An image showcasing various visitors playing Muscle Magic at the our booth at Dutch Comic Con.