Momentag
Momentag is an action packed multiplayer tag game where player are robots that swing around a city scape with grappling hooks as they play tag games.
I worked on Momentag for the final project of a 5 month study abroad in the Netherlands.
During the project I was the design team lead where I was able to do level design, UI design, mechanic and game mode design, as well as help facilitate communication between the various teams.
This game was created in unity over a 2 month period with a team of 15 students.
For the creation of Momentag the team used the scrum method. We had 4, 2 week sprints where at the end of the second week the team had to present the game only using what was currently working inside the engine.
Sprint 1 was when the design team made many decisions. I was responsible for running meetings with the programming team about the movement system and testing which version felt right for the feelings the game was supposed to evoke, as well as art meeting about the direction we wanted to go for the visuals of the level and the skybox.
For the design team our main goal was to have a level graybox that we could test the movement and early forms of the game modes to get a more accurate idea of what the game feels like to play. Our second goal was to start the UI menu creation process since with the small art team that we had we needed to see how much time the UI would take to get a better view on how much art was needed, as this directly impacts how we design the level and certain mechanics that require more art to play and look good.
Sprint 2 was quite hectic. After the player movement code was complete the design team was able to start testing and tweaking the numbers based on our first graybox prototype. Now that we had a very basic menu and game loop where players could enter the level and swing around we had our first tests by people outside the team. The most important takeaway from those tests where that the game was hard to get the hang of.
So I decided that my time would be best spent on a tutorial to teach players how to move around the map. Unfortunately, due to other unforeseen higher priority tasks that arose during development I was not able to get the tutorial out of the basic graybox status and in the end we had to fall back onto basic control explantions in the pause menu.
Sprint 3 we had a more complete level after having to make some vast changes to how the buildings where created. We were also able to hold proper playtests where players who had never seen or heard of Momentag could play the game. I was able to use the universities UX lab that had cameras, microphones, monitors to watch the playtests and recording equipment to gather all the data we could want.
During development I was solely responsible for the UI design and was able to mockup more finalized UI layout during sprint 3 before the art team needed the list of required sprites.
Sprint 4 was the final sprint we had time for during the semester during which we made an incredible amount of progress. During playtesting we found that players had issues with not being able to find each other in the level so we came up with having the players tagging range be visualized with large blue and red bubbles so they were easy to spot flying through the sky.
The team also had to plan and set up for the end of year showcase called Open Up. I was able to further my knowledge of event and showcase planning and being able to plan for all possible situations.
In the end we had a fleshed out game concept that was functional and wicked fun to play. During our showcase we had over a hundred players try out our game and overall the players responded very positively to it.
