Heroic Gameday: Lead Mission Designer
I was responsible for directing mission content and the mission design team.
Missions are short educational game experiences. They teach a single concept 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. Led a release process each week ensuring missions met our quality bar.
Directed work for 8-12 programmers & managed 4-6 designers.
Across the pipeline I directed work and gave feedback.
I also 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.
About the Game
Heroic Game Day is an educational MMO for kids. Kids play alongside a cast superhero NPCs who teach them new topics.
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 missions, run around their school’s personal campus with friends, attack other schools in PvP game modes, and explore a constantly growing world.
Working as a Lead:
Being a lead was an enormous learning experience as I went from a individual contributor to guiding a team for the first time.
My work was focused on learning to be a leader, big team challenges / goals, and releasing many small pieces of content.
Iterating on our Design Philosophy
Kids today and our target demographics have unique challenges from a design perspective:
They are learning about computers with tablets and phones first. Keyboard skills are still developing.
Our target demographic included many kids who may not have access to traditional gaming devices or experiences.
As we tried different gameplay types and conducted more playtesting, I ensured our designs resulted in a consistently fun and accessible experience.
To ensure a collective vision:
I helped standardize our review process.
Gave feedback based on consistent principles for our player base.
Presented actionable playtest results and player feedback to the team.
A part of this was developing do’s 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 3D platforming.
Creating a Development Process
I began leading when we had new team members, evolving tools, less time budget, and were given intense content creation goals. We worked a lot on our development pipeline in order to handle these factors.
This 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 as many needs as possible while being super-fast to work through.
Our challenges were unique since our content had to satisfy not just players but parents & educators as well.
(Note: Art was handled via an outsourced studio and we often got QA feedback mid development as well)
With very limited QA availability, simple review docs created a consistent quality bar and saved a ton of time by catching smaller details before content was sent to QA.