Game Jam - The Revolver — Kanericky's Personal Website

Overview

The Revolver is a project that I made within three weeks for a Game Jam event held in China. The topic of that Game Jam was using any word starts with “RE” as the inspration. The word we have chosen is “Revolver”.

Game/Level Designer, Programmer

Role

Unity 3D, C# Scipting, Miro board

Tools & Skills

Lead the team through the concept phase to the game delivery

Design levels from concept, grey box to polishment with art assets

Programming in-game functionailities and events

Project management - tracking tasks, bugs and production status

Responsibility

Link to the project: TheRevolver

Creative Process

Concept Phase

After learning about the theme of the event, we conducted a brainstorming session. Due to the need for online collaboration, we chose to use MIRO as the primary collaboration tool for this project. The decision to use MIRO was primarily driven by two factors: on one hand, considering the small team size, we wanted to avoid overly heavy and cumbersome project collaboration tools; on the other hand, MIRO has been widely utilized in my work, leaving me impressed with its flexibility and user-friendliness.

Our team consists of three members, including myself, all relatively new to the gaming industry. Gaming has been a significant part of our lives since our student days. As someone who has a strong affinity for first-person shooter games, I consider myself fortunate to have entered a renowned company after graduation, working on my favorite genre, first-person shooter projects.

Therefore, upon seeing the theme "RE," the first word that came to mind was "Reload." After several rounds of discussion, we felt that this idea could lead to an intriguing and comprehensive gameplay concept. Additionally, we suddenly realized that the term "Revolver," a staple in western cowboy showdowns, also conveniently starts with "RE," which further evoked vivid imagery.

In most shooting games, reloading has always been a simplified process, often requiring players to press a single button on the keyboard or controller. However, from a realistic perspective, reloading in games lacks a certain depth. This brings to mind a design that left a profound impression on me, stemming from the game "Escape from Tarkov": Unlike traditional shooters, players not only need to focus on shooting targets but also need to constantly manage their ammunition. If the need arises to refill an empty magazine, they even have to wait for each bullet to be reloaded, adding a layer of realism and time management to the gameplay.

Pre-production Phase

During the pre-production phase, we closely collaborated to create various mockups to validate our ideas and define the game's core interactions and 3Cs (character, camera, and control). The images below illustrate the process from initial sketches to placeholder rough models used in the editor, and finally to the visual effects in the game.

The most important goal during the pre-production phase is to define the core of the game, and the most effective way to do this is by delivering a Vertical Slice. A Vertical Slice is like a small piece of cake, although it may not be large in volume, it contains every layer of the cake; in other words, we use the Vertical Slice to showcase the most essential gameplay flow of the game.

Production Phase

After entering the production stage, the core gameplay flow has been determined. At this stage, we mainly focus on increasing the number of levels, improving the quality of assets, and polishing the overall game quality. As the level production progresses, the entire game becomes more complete and clear, however, it also brings a large number of bugs and issues.

Reflection on Design and Development

Early and reasonably defining project scope – fewer but more appropriate core systems

Project scope determines the size of the project, taking into account project goals, capabilities, and objective constraints. In our project development, a "3D shooting game" compared to our development bandwidth is too large, resulting in us feeling very powerless in the later stages of the project—there are many systems, but not enough time for optimization and polishing.

Conduct Playtest as early as possible to validate core gameplay, leaving the vast majority of time for polishing.

Playtest can collect more feedback and data, and make timely adjustments to the design direction. Combined with the first point, we can make playable versions as early as possible and test them with players.

In the development process, most of the time should be devoted to the Production stage. However, in this development, the time we allocated for Production was the shortest. Because the project scope is too large, this makes it difficult for us to control the amount of polishing content in the later stages.

Do not presuppose players' experiences based on your own.

From my own perspective, the rich experience in shooting games brings about a cognitive bias in design, that is, projecting one's own experience onto the player's experience. Therefore, early testing is very important, and specific screening and classification of test players are also necessary.

Track every task, bug, and feedback in a recorded form.

Because the number of systems we designed this time is not small, it is particularly important to explore a reasonable and standardized project management system to track these tasks during development. However, we claim to pursue agility and speed, but we overlook the importance of project tracking. Agility in projects is not just about reducing certain tasks but should be about pursuing a more rational and effective development pipeline — I think this can only be summed up in iterating through pitfalls.

Game Jam - The Revolver