Heroic Gameday: Lead Mission Designer
I was responsible for missions and the mission design team. Our team was remote across the U.S. and the company was distributed globally.
Missions are short educational game experiences. They teach a single concept within a given topic and come with a story, minigame, and quiz.
Examples of our topics included: personal finance, teamwork, leadership, trade skills, civics.
Here are some of my key accomplishments:
Led the development & release for 200+ missions. Worked through a release process each week ensuring missions met our quality bar.
Directed work for 8-12 programmers & managed 4-6 designers.
Across the mission development pipeline I directed work and gave feedback. I often jumped in engine to modify levels, dialogue, and Lua scripts as needed.
Tools used:
Miro, Google Sheets and Docs, JIRA, Unity, Web based game editor extending Unity with Lua.
Contributions as a lead
Being a lead was an enormous learning experience as I went from a individual contributor to guiding a team.
My work wasn’t focused on a single piece of content but rather big team challenges and many small pieces of content. I certainly felt like a producer as much as a designer at times!
I’ve described some of our biggest challenges and how I helped the team overcome them below.
Iterating on our design ‘philosophy’
Kids today and our target demographics have unique challenges from a design perspective:
Kids these days are learning about computers with tablets and phones first. Keyboard skills are still developing or are very rudimentary.
Limited gaming experience, our target demographic included many kids who may not have access to traditional gaming devices and may have very limited to no gaming experience.
As we developed more content, tried different gameplay types and conducted more playtesting, I ensured our designs resulted in a consistently fun and accessible experience.
A part of this was developing dos’ and don’ts when creating for kids.
DOs: Keep dialogue short and sweet, objectives simple, have mechanics result in strong feedback. Provide a lot of guidance on what to do, where to go and support for if they fail.
DONTs: Have players focus on more than 1 objective or mechanic at a time, Use time based pressure or tight skill windows, add too much dialogue, rely too heavily on platforming.
To ensure a collective vision I helped standardize our review process, made sure I was giving well-rounded feedback, shared actionable playtest results and communicated with designers individually and as a team.
Even with a global team, I got to help run several in-person playtests. We learned a lot and got to track the game’s progress over time.
About the game
Heroic Game Day is an educational superhero themed MMO for kids.
Built for Chrome browsers & Chromebooks, It caters towards low opportunity kids and is live in schools across the U.S. and India.
Kids can engage with single player instanced missions, run around their school’s personal campus with friends, attack other schools in PvP game modes, and explore different parts of a constantly growing world.
(Note: Art was handled via an outsourced studio and we often got QA feedback mid development as well)
Simple review docs like this one helped save our team time by ensuring small details could be caught before myself or QA reviewed a mission.
Creating a development process
I began leading during a time when we had new team members, evolving tools, less time budget, and was given intense content creation goals. We worked a lot on our development pipeline in order to handle these factors.
The flow chart is a simplified version of the development process I helped create. We went through many iterations of pitch formats, design doc styles, review types, etc.
We focused on creating a process that addressed everyone’s needs while being super fast to work through.
Our process was unique in that our content had to satisfy not just players but parents & educators as well.
After the mission is live we maintained it as our engine, tools or game changed. If something went wrong I guided the team as they fixed it.
Mission Designer
Before I was asked to lead the team I worked for a year as a mission designer! I created several missions covering topics such as recycling, personal finance and confidence.
For each mission I was responsible for the following:
Overall gameplay flow for the mission, focusing on creating a fun learning experience
Laying out and building levels within very tight performance parameters.
Writing dialogue scripts, gameplay documents, and art asset requests.
Communicating with programmers to give feedback or answer questions as they implemented mission content based on my documentation.
Making basic edits to Lua scripts on my own as needed.
Breakdown: Count Dinero - Income & Expenses
I created a pair of missions to cover the financial concepts of income and expenses. These missions weren’t supposed to cover every nuance but rather introduce the concepts to kids more broadly. These missions feature Count Dinero a money-loving superhero vampire who teaches personal finance.
Income - Caves in Chaos!
The town Granite Hills is under attack from Lord Darkstar’s Pi-Bots. The nearby caves have glowing crystals which attract tourists. The caves have been taken over by Pi-Bots, disrupting the town’s only source of income.
Players speak with townsfolk who earn different types of income. The Mayor of Granite Hills hires the player to destroy the bots, allowing the player to earn income themselves. The players destroy bots outside the caves and get ready to head inside.
Alongside regular rewards, players earn Cave Dollars a mission only currency given to them by the Mayor.
I designed the town with a few restraints in mind:
It needed to be small and condensed to be performant but still feel like a place these characters could live in.
The NPCs needed to be easily found and navigation between them simple. There aren’t any alleyways or NPCS tucked behind buildings for example.
We wanted to show off many different types of income which mean needing a diversity of buildings / occupations.
I had to use an existing set of modular home assets
Expenses - The Costs of Caving
The player dives into the caves but must climb a narrow uphill path while dodging giant boulders to reach the Pi-Bots
Players learn about expenses by choosing whether or not purchase powerups along the path. They spend cave dollars earned in the previous mission.
Powerups:
Pickaxes destroy boulders that players collide with.
Juices boost the player’s speed allowing them to reach safe spots more quickly.
I designed these simple powerups to get players thinking about how to spend thier money.
I created Cave Dollars to ensure all players encounter identical spending choices, if we had used game-wide coins players would enter with different amounts.
This level went through a few iterations to get the timing windows right as the player moves from safe spot to safe spot.
If players spend recklessly they won’t have enough to afford powerups near the end of the path. Originally, Count Dinero would comment / advise the player on thier spending choices but this was sadly cut for time.
They reach the source of the Pi-Bots, destroy them, and activate the minecart tracks, allowing tourists to visit again. Thus saving the town’s income.
