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.
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 reviewed content & gave feedback.
I 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 was released in schools across the U.S. and India.
Kids can enjoy 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 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 with a set of strong challenges ahead:
We had a few new team members
Constantly evolving tools
A significantly reduced time budget and intense content creation goals.
We worked a lot on our development pipeline in order to handle these factors.
This flow chart is a simple 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.
Heroic Gameday: Mission Designer
Before I led the team, I worked for a year as a mission designer!
For each mission I was responsible for the following:
Overall gameplay flow, focusing on creating a fun learning experience
Laying out and building levels within very tight performance metrics.
Writing dialogue scripts, gameplay documents, and art asset requests.
Communicating with programmers as they implemented gameplay logic based on my documentation.
Making edits to Lua scripts on my own as needed.
Highlight reel of various missions I worked on
Breakdown: Count Dinero - Income & Expenses
I created a pair of missions to cover the financial concepts of income and expenses. These missions introduce the concepts to kids more broadly. They feature Count Dinero, a superhero vampire who teaches personal finance.
Income - Caves in Chaos!
The town of Granite Hills is a tourist destination thanks to it’s caves containing glowing crystals. The main villain’s robots have attacked the caves. This has disrupted the town’s source of income.
Players speak with townsfolk who earn different types of income. The Mayor of Granite Hills hires the player to destroy the robots, allowing the player to earn income. The players destroy bots outside the caves and get ready to head inside.
Alongside regular rewards, players earn Cave Dollars a mission specific currency.
I designed the town with a few restraints in mind:
It needed to be very small 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 behind buildings for example.
We wanted to show off many different types of income which meant needing a diversity of buildings / occupations.
I had to use an existing set of modular home assets
Playthrough of Caves in Chaos!
Overhead shot of the town
Expenses - The Costs of Caving
The player enters the caves and needs to reach the end to destroy the robots. They dodge boulders while climbing a narrow uphill path. 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 - boosts the player’s speed allowing them to reach safe spots more quickly.
I designed these powerups to get players thinking about how to spend their money.
I created Cave Dollars to ensure 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, won’t be able to afford powerups near the end of the path.
They reach the source of the robots, destroy them, and activate the minecart tracks, allowing tourists to visit again. Thus saving the town’s income.
Playthrough of The Costs of Caving
Overhead of the cave path with collision shown
The player’s POV of oncoming boulders
Buying power-ups with Cave Dollars