Team Size: 5 Members Role: Game Designer, Co-Producer, Artist Engine: Unity Platform: VR
Duration: 1 Month
Project Description
Laserfade was part of an ETC project called Jam Session, focused on exploring rhythm games.
In this game, players are tasked with shooting targets that appear in the wireframe-styled world around them. Players must charge their shots to destroy targets; however, doing so removes the music from the world. Since shots must be charged for a certain number of beats, and targets require different numbers of beats to be destroyed, players must internalize the beat in order to succeed.
Contributions
Game Designer
Led my team in brainstorming sessions
Worked with my team to develop ideas and mechanics for each of the individual prototypes
Implemented ideas in-engine
Playtested prototypes throughout lifespan of the game
Co-producer
Led daily Scrum meetings for the team
Worked with each member to ensure that they knew what work had to be done for the day
Kept track of what work had already been completed.
Wrote postmortems for the prototypes as well as keeping in touch with the many contacts important to the project.
Artist
Contributed models, textures, and particle effects for this game.
Project Video
Prompt: How can we create a game focused on testing players’ internal sense of rhythm?
Prototype Goals
The goal of this game was to explore the idea of testing players’ sense of rhythm by removing the music, while still having them perform actions to the beat.
Design Thoughts
Aiming needed to be as easy as possible, so we made it so that the gun automatically locks onto to the closest target. This prevented people from having to worry about aiming and rhythm at the same time, which is a difficult concept to quickly grasp.
Lessons Learned
Rhythm is already a hard concept. Manual aiming would have added unnecessary difficulty and concept to keep track of.
Players like aspects of repetition and predictability