Project Elephants
One project I loved working on was Project Elephants. It was a team created under Junior Achievement, a nonprofit organization as a way to create a video game with a single goal, to teach high school students proper financial literacy. This was something that instantly piqued my interest since it was something that I never did before. It sounded like a lot of fun and I was lucky enough to get onto the project. I, unfortunately, joined late in development but it was also the first time I was just a designer and didn't have any title hanging over my head. From there I worked closely with the lead designer to create something different and something that I could be proud of.
The Grand Challenge
A whole new beast
When I was approached by a friend of mine and told about this project, I was initally curious. I wanted to spread my wings a bit farther and explore the teaching side of games and that was just what I needed to do for this project. This project was nearing its completion and they needed a few things from a designer. Firstly they wanted a level designer to go over and clean up their existing world and secondly they wanted another person to go over the numbers/systems design. After a fast week of getting acquainted with everyone and reading over the GDD, I sat down with my lead Tyler and went over some of the initial ideas I had. This lead to a series of meetings and talks with us and the programmers to create the event system for the game. This really was a different experience. When it came to teams, I had only really done either solo projects, small groups, or the team from Guardians' Legacy. This time I had to join an existing team and learn their ways, how they dealt with information, working with clients, and their preferred software. Beyond that, I worked on set design to create a cleaner and less cluttered environment for the player. It was such an amazing experience to watch this game grow to where it is now. As I said before this was a client project and it was always cool to see and talk with them whenever we did a breakdown or updates. Project Elephants is currently in its soft launch and is planned to be completed in the following months.