Badmin is a top down shooter game but with a twist. You have just been hired by the Admin to help moderator the server. Your role as a moderator is to make sure everyone follows the rules of the server. Being the moderator gives you special abilities and it is your job to use those abilities to keep the server hacker/cheater free.
My contributions:
- Collaborated with the art team to come up with the style we wanted
- Took the tile maps the artists made and used them to build and design the levels
- Wrote the dialogue/text for the Admin
- Created the message scenes between rounds
- As scrum master I managed the HacknPlan to keep the team on schedule to meet deadlines
- Was in charge of creating play testing questions to receive meaningful feedback from testers
Project goals:
- Create a unique 2D shooter game
- Improve level design skills
- Try something new and develop the story for the game
Biggest challenges:
- Gaining initial interest in the project
- Players camping in game avoiding the Admin making it so they always get away with abusing their power
- Creating the interactions between the Admin and Moderator
The process:
Making this game had a very intense learning process because our initial idea was not received well by others. We started off with this idea of just being the moderator to the server but people did not seem to really like the idea because the player was more of a spectator and after our initial play test we knew we needed to make a change. As a team we brainstormed some ways to try and gain player interest and increase engagement. We decided that putting the Moderator in as a player in the game would be the best way to get players to engage with the game. This added a multitasking feature so that the player has to work to keep the server clean and the has to also play the 2D shooter aspect. This was big change and greatly increased interest in our game. Another challenge that was discovered was that when we were reading through responses to our second play test we found that many people would just camp and avoid the Admin completely. To fix this the team decided to have the Admin teleport to “check in” to see what you are doing. This caused the player to move out of range of the Admin so that when you used your abilities you would not be punished. Creating the interactions between the Admin also posed a new challenge personally because I had never worked on doing story and character design before but I wanted to try something new and develop my skills as a game designer. I created 3 scenes in between rounds that would act as chat rooms between the Admin and the Moderator (player). I had to use these interactions to create a character that helped make the player more immersed in the game, instruct the player on what they are supposed to do and what their goal is, and also to show that he is meaningful and not just there to give instruction. Making the Admin meaningful was quite challenging because of my inexperience designing characters it was hard for me to express desirable characteristics for him. This game was a crazy, iterative process, but in the end the Badmin team was able to create a game that people liked and it is something that we were proud of.
Click below to go to our Itch.io page to see more of the game: https://wvars123.itch.io/badmin
To the right are screenshots of work I contributed to the game:
