Game Studio II: Dev Blog #2

If I had to choose one prototype that my team worked on this semester to call our strongest, it would definitely be Bird vs Business. What made this game special to me is that it embodies a lot of what I like as a designer. There’s lots of chaos, there’s some social commentary (I got the idea when reading about the whole GME stocks situation), and it’s pretty easy to iterate upon.

As far as what made the prototype successful, I think we were all just really into it and ready to give it our all. I initially had 4 major ideas for prototypes at the start of the first sprint and when I mentioned this one, my team immediately agreed that this would be the game we work on for Greenlight. We responded well to our initial feedback, specifically when it came to the flight mechanics. At first I had wanted to implement an upgrade system where you could use the money the business loses to buy disguises or have bird allies come in through a window to distract employees, but it was brought to our attention that the flight system needed to be perfect, so we spent a lot more time working on that and put additional systems on hold.

While I didn’t work too much on the original prototype, I did work on the Greenlight version quite a bit. There was a lot of back and forth between me, my team’s other designer, Sean, and our programmer, Alex, about how we could make the flight feel better and what the office should look like. My team worked really hard on collision, the flight system, and AI while I focused on making the office. I’m pretty proud of the final version of the level that we I made for the demo. I don’t really consider level design to be my specialty, but with lots of reference photos I was able to make some solid assets and put together something that I believe embodies the atmosphere I wanted for the game.

Although our game didn’t go forward for Greenlight, I don’t have many regrets. We made a really good presentation and the game was exactly what we had envisioned. If we had a little more time I would’ve liked to add more to the narrative and perhaps give the employees and HR some dialogue, but besides that there’s really nothing I would change.