Alex MacDonald
Game/Level Designer
Bleater
Project Type
University game development project
Date
Nov 2021 - Mar 2022
Role
Game/Narrative Designer
Link
Bleater is a cynical parody of social media which asks players to question whether or not the posts they are reading are contributing to the cycle of doom-scrolling. How long can you last before doom and gloom starts to get to you?
Check out some of my process work below!
Process Work
Getting Started:
GDD, Team Charter, and Trello
The team and I started by a GDD. I nailed down the details on the project overview/goal, the story, mechanics, progression system, art/UI, and some legal information.
Next I created our team charter. I summarized the project, clearly stated the roles and responsibilities, laid out the hierarchical structure of the team, and stated my personal goals as well as project goals.
Finally I created the Trello. I planned out some initial tasks and separated them into bi-weekly sprints.
After some initial design, a creative brief was prepared.
When creating the creative brief, I thought about what needed to get across to people interested in the game from both a stakeholder and a publisher perspective.
I made sure the game's core pillars were included.
I also included diagrams detailing the gameplay loop and details about the project's goals, target demographics, and technical information.
Master Schedule and
Risk Analysis Report.
To finish off the preparation phase of the project, I created a master schedule that went into much greater detail on what tasks needed to be completed, by who, when, and what dependencies each task had.
The Risk Analysis report goes into all the risk's my team and the project carried. I created detailed plans on what each risk/problem looked like as well as what solutions would be implemented to overcome these issues should they arise. Below is the risk chart created to illustrate these risks.
Telemetry and Data.
A lot of my work went into managing spreadsheets, designing "posts", and interpreting/formatting telemetry data. A large part of the game relied on fostering a shared understanding between the team and the player through the readibility of the "posts".
​
As players played through the game, they guessed whether a post was positive or negative, and whether or not they correctly guessed this was collected and sent to data sheets. I formatted these sheets as well as questionnaire feedback into useable, readable data and actionable feedback.
​
On the right is both a graph I created detailing some the most troublesome posts that players often got incorrect that needed to be tweaked as well as scores given by players rating different aspects of the game that compared previous feedback data to current data to see how scores changed over time.
Post-Mortem and Final Thoughts.
This project was a big success for me. I learned a lot about project managment/workflows and wrote a lot of common industry documentation like risk analysis reports, master schedules, project plans, GDD's, creative briefs, team charters, and more.
​
I also got some valuable game design experience. This game was intended as a "game for change", with the game's core message attempting to educate players about the dangers of doom-scrolling. Working a lot within Excel, managing data, and providing feedback to the other roles on the team based on this data was both a lot of fun and taught me a lot.
​
This project is currently available to play on Itch.io and may be improved on in the future.