Degree Objectives 1

Lead a project team in implementing design, documentation, development, testing, Q/A and deployment.

I fulfilled this degree objective through work undertaken during my time with the UAT Game Studios acting in a producer role, as well as through my leadership on a personal hobby project I was involved with leading.

Guardian's Legacy

Guardian's Legacy was a game project run through the UAT Game Studios that I was involved with through my MS501 Game Production & Documentation course. As can be expected, much of my work focused on the area of documentation for my team. My large focuses were on the rewrite of their GDD and assisting with their worldbuilding for the game. I also advised project leadership regarding their SCRUM implementation and worked to reorganize and refocus their overall documentation, participating in their meetings and working with them weekly.

I believe my work on Guardian's Legacy fulfills degree requirements because while I was not the project lead, I did display leadership skills in implementing many of the required portions of this objective. This project focuses especially on the areas of design and documentation, as I condensed a large and unfocused GDD into a tightly-packed and usable one. I worked extensively with all members of the project teams to clean up their documentation and ensure that necessary information was made available when it was needed. I worked in the area of narrative and world design to assist in their worldbuilding, and ensured that these areas were consistent with elements previously established.

You can view my personal postmortem at this link.

Guardian's Legacy Project Page

This a video that I produced for the class discussing the project.

Warcraft Conquest: Shadow in the Sands & In Death's Shadow

Warcraft Conquest is a hobbyist project that I am a moderator and event coordinator for. It is a platform for World of Warcraft players to tell collaborative stories of war in a living world. We run large "campaign" events that are akin to a giant game of Dungeons & Dragons, involving hundreds of players and numerous guild organizations for a truly epic experience. Shadow in the Sands ran during February 2020, and In Death's Shadow ran during September 2020.

On these projects, I served in leadership and an administrative capacity. I was the lead writer on one and coordinated with members of numerous disciplines to prepare and execute a large-scale public event. I produced and oversaw a number of pieces of documentation related to these events, including story design notes, event cards, item design spreadsheets, and survey results. We had a full development cycle that had numerous meetings and breakdowns of work, including using sprint-like structures so that we were able to bring something to the table each time the team spoke. We involved both game design with the dice rolling system and story/narrative design with the story we told during these projects. Lastly, we did perform quality assurance checks on our assets and story work ahead of our successful deployments of both projects.

I believe my work on these two projects fulfills degree objectives because these projects saw real-world deployment with numerous participants. Every piece of the degree requirements was realized across both campaigns, and I was able to apply my leadership skills to ensure a smooth deployment and strong finish for each one.

In Death's Shadow received press coverage from IcyVeins, a World of Warcraft fansite.

The In Death's Shadow website can be reviewed here.

In Death's Shadow project page

Shadow in the Sands project page