Molementum
Lead Designer | Team of 18 | Summer 2023 - Spring 2024
Molementum is a fast-paced networked multiplayer party game that I’m currently working on as my Capstone project for my game design degree at Champlain College. This project is currently ongoing, with the intent being to publish Molementum on Steam by May of 2024.
As part of the Capstone program for the Game Studio at Champlain College, this project was conceptualized and developed by myself and a team of 9 over the course of 14 week-long sprints before undergoing a formal greenlight process by a board of faculty, alumni, and industry professionals. After being greenlit, we onboarded 9 new team members and are now continuing development!
As Design Lead, my responsibilities include organizing and coordinating the design discipline for Molementum— which comprises 6 designers— design and team documentation, in-engine prototyping and implementation, and completing scrum rituals.
For this project, myself and my team have used Unity engine, C# for scripting, Git for version control, and the Atlassian suite for sprint management and documentation.
We used scrum with one-week sprints organized around fixed milestones (Greenlight, Alpha, Beta, Release Candidates, Gold Master).
My team on this project opted for a decolonized team format with a very flat hierarchy, which has provided lots of boons and a couple of drawbacks so far. Design ideas come from everywhere, and we’re a very interdisciplinary team, but that makes my job of coordinating designers and being a source of truth for the game’s design a bit more difficult. Part of the way I’ve worked to mitigate that is (in addition to using methodologies like spikes and feature teams) having individual designers take ownership over specific features or systems— for my role as design lead on a decolonized team, it’s more important for me to act as a coordinator than a boss or manager. So far, this project has been a thoroughly educational crash course in leadership roles and what they involve in a development environment. It’s also the first time I’ve worked with a team of this size or a project of this time scale, and I’m coming out of it with a much greater knowledge of standard methodologies and practices in the world of game dev.
Below is a short design reel detailing how I was able to test, evaluate, and iterate upon the game’s structure (and in particular, one system that wasn’t working) in the earlier stages of development:
Design Reel
After that major rework, it was my responsibility to communicate the changes to the team. This was a game loop document I made and presented (click image, links to Google Drive):
