Catastrophe Factory

Catastrophe Factory is a game made for SMU Guildhall Team Game Production I. The game was developed in Unity over an 11-week development cycle by a interdisciplinary team of six. In this 2D tablet puzzle game, play through 12 levels as you assist Patch the cat with escaping from a treacherous factory! I was in charge of project management as well as designing the first 4 game levels.

Project Post Mortem

What went well in development?

The team was able to rapidly iterate throughout development, pivoting on ideas & coming up with multiple versions of ideas to test. We made sure our game was always in a playable state at the end of each day and our software developer made sure his code was designer-friendly and would last throughout the project with minimum tech debt. We stayed organized and on target, allowing us to complete the project on time while hitting all of our goals.

What didn’t go well in development?

Throughout the beginnings of the project we struggled with visual conveyance items, the lever concept saw a multitude of iterations and artwork concepts before we landed on our final decision. This led to several confused playtesters and a lot of artwork that had to be redone. One of the early milestones, Proof of Concept Gameplay, we focused on showing off our features by making challenging levels, however, this led to us missing the milestone as instead of being challenging, the levels were completely unplayable to a kleenex tester due to the lack of teaching and previously mentioned conveyance issues.

What did you learn?

I learned how to execute on several Scrum practices such as daily Scrum meetings, maintaining the Scrum board, Sprint reviews, and Sprint retrospectives. I worked on my communication both within a diverse team as well as communicating and presenting with project stakeholders. I was able to learn more about the design process, pipelines for creating levels, and the importance of fully fleshed out code bases that are crafted to reduce tech debt.