Various Prototypes - Producer, Programmer

I made around ten prototypes with a partner this spring to explore different concepts and find a marketable idea.

With my partner, I worked as the primary programmer and took charge of keeping us on track. We had to finish a new prototype every week, so my focus was on constantly assessing and reducing scope so we could maintain our core vision while meeting the deadline.

One week we were making a fishing game. My partner and I came up with an idea for a fishing game, then my partner added in twin-stick shooter mechanics and a boss-rush finisher. I had to work with my partner to pare down their ideas, while making sure they felt heard, to focus on making one game. This helped us stay true to the mechanical twist we were introducing while also keeping us on track for the week, as the other mechanics were out of scope.

In the video above I briefly demonstrate one game we made, Fowl Feud. We chose this game to further develop for an extra week of polish, as we were able to identify that it had one of the most interesting and marketable concepts of our ten prototypes. I programmed the prototype in the first week to be as generic as possible, so as to make expansion easy, thus allowing us to quickly add features in our second week. I’ll be able to bring this programming experience to future teams as a producer so I can effectively work with my programmers to make reasonable architecture and scope decisions.