PLAY GALLERIA ON ANDROID

Galleria is a 2D puzzle platformer adventure designed for children aged 8-11. With fun and engaging artwork, immersive puzzles and an interesting story, players are encouraged to flex their problem solving abilities and fine motor skills.

Galleria represents my first major work as a developer. Acting as the producer and design lead, among many other smaller roles, I led a six person, multi-disciplined Agile team over a period of 12 months to complete the capstone project for the Bachelor of Interactive Entertainment & Games at QUT. You can read more about the game and the team here, and read on to see a wrap-up of my role on the project.

Stage one
Concept, Pre-Production and Greenlight

I brought together a team of developers and over the course of several weeks of research and conceptualising, pitched the concept for Galleria to a team of stakeholders (teaching staff). After an initial green light, I led the team in a Scrum style management system with the aim of producing a single-level prototype to pitch at the end of semester and receive the go-ahead for full development in stage 2. 

In the later half of this stage, I worked with two young users to identify ideas, mechanics and themes with the potential to be used within the game, along with discovering pain points, especially those unique to designing for children. Although early user testing was not specifically encouraged, this pen-and-paper testing with actual users was invaluable in terms of discovering effective level design and thoroughly exploring the usability of the basic mechanics. This also gave the game the advantage of an early user persona which helped significantly with passing the final green light pitch at the end of semester. 

Throughout this stage, I worked with a Scrum-style methodology that involved weekly tasks for each team member, regular contact among team members and a weekly stand-up with stakeholders to identify what was achieved during the week, what setbacks were encountered and what next week's plans were. 

In this stage of pre-production, my main roles were:
- as producer/project manager, delegating tasks on a weekly basis and presenting the weekly standup to stakeholders
- developing the concept, mechanics and level design of the game with the help of initial testing
- developing the characters and narrative relating to the game
- development of abilities and limitations of each character
- concepting various potential user interface options for the game

As producer, I was also the highest tier of decision making within the team in regards to what was approved to be included in the game, especially in terms of the game's look and feel.

A major component of my role in the team included decision making relating to controls, providing feedback to the user and the way we taught the user how to play. This was a fantastic first foray into level design. Designing for children presented a unique challenge, which required thorough research and the best way for us to do this was to utilise user personas and test on real kids. This process of concepting, testing and problem solving was incredibly valuable. 

Finally, along with presenting a final pitch including a working single level prototype to stakeholders, I developed a design document for Galleria including a Gantt chart plan for another six months of full development. Each member of the team contributed to identifying each of the specific tasks that would be required to produce the final deliverable, at least ten minutes of gameplay. 

Stage 2
Production, PLaytesting and Release

In the latter half of development, I continued to lead the team with a Scrum-style methodology. Working off a burn-down chart based on the design document and Gantt chart, I delegated tasks weekly in order to meet time-based deadlines for different phases of the project.

The team focused on producing a stable, playable build which could be tested, and it was at this point that my role became a lot more agile in terms of filling the gaps of what was required within the team. While continuing my role as producer and project manager, my primary role at this stage became the play-testing coordinator. On a weekly basis I would recruit and coordinate playtesters, record and analyse playtest outcomes and provide a graphical breakdown of testing results along with our planned adjustments based on those outcomes as part of my weekly standup with our stakeholders. My roles also evolved to include:
- lead play-testing coordinator
- post-testing evaluation and re-prioritisation
- audio supervisor
- marketing coordinator
- website designer

Throughout the playtesting process, it became clear that our initial ideas for the control system needed a major overhaul. As a team we decided to take the risk to change them despite being quite close to our deadline. Thankfully, our risk paid off and after some extra testing it was very clear the updated controls were better. 

As we came closer to release, I handled all the pre-release marketing and publicity, including developing our team website, reaching out to potential interested reviewers and generally putting our game out into the big wide Internet. The team also participated in the end of year showcase event for the class of 2017, for which I prepared our t shirts and all other marketing materials. To finish off the project, I presented our final pitch to a team of teaching staff and external professionals, including teaching staff from other universities and local industry professionals. This was essentially an exercise in "selling" the game to a group of potential investors. 

Overall, this experience was incredibly valuable to me as both a producer and as a game designer and I am very proud of the product we came away with at the end of our capstone project. To date, Galleria sits in the 100-500 download range on the Play store and has received some great feedback from users in the form of reviews.