overview

I joined Bartlet Jones in the Fall of 2017 to work on an announced UE4 game. Although my official title was Production Coordinator, I was involved in multiple aspects of the project.

As a production coordinator, I primarily assisted the lead producer with managing the game’s system features. Additionally, I worked with the associate producer to organize the daily standups, reviews, and discussions. Part of my production responsibilities also included administrating our task tracking and wiki software, Manuscript. Because of my light web development background, I was able to customize certain portions of Manuscript to better tailor it for different departments within the studio.

I also designed the wireframes for the game’s UI and screenflow. Additionally, I designed the game’s core system features, which includes replays and rewards. While still very early in the development process, the wireframes, screenflow, and features went through multiple rounds of iteration based on reviews and conversations with multiple department leads and studio heads, as well as the publisher. Special care was taken to ensure the all aspects of my work accounted for any technical limitations presented by the engineers and adhered to platform TRCs.

Unfortunately, as of January 23rd, 2018, the project was canceled by our publisher and the studio laid off most of its staff.

wireframes

For this project, I shifted to using Axure Pro as my primary wireframing tool. Many of the wireframes were fully interactable and some features would behave differently under certain conditions. The project was cancelled early in its lifecycle, so only some of the features outlined were integrated into the game. However, all were approved by the engineers and project director.

Part of the way through VBL’s development, I shifted from using Balsamiq to Axure Pro as my primary wireframing tool. As a result, many of the wireframes were fully interactable and thoroughly utilized conditional logic. The project was cancelled early in its lifecycle, so only some of these features were integrated into the game. However, they were all approved by the engineers and project lead.

These are some of the wireframes which were made to demonstrate the flow for playing in a public online match with friends.

Tools: Balsamiq, Axure RP, Lucidchart

gameplay

The initial wireframes started in Balsamiq. This early version was used as a basis for the engineers to start preliminary work of integrating menus into the game. As the video demonstrates, this very early build was still missing key parts of the local exhibition flow and certain features weren’t functional yet.