Our Team
I am the director of this game, and was very lucky to collaborate with a bunch of talented artists and engineers. Aside from directing and designing, I remained one of the primary gameplay programmers throughout our time working on this game, and had a hand in practically every aspect of the game.
I came into this project with about 10 years of experience making small games and animation projects in unity, and with some experience collaborating with other artists and developers, but I had limited formal training in computer science, and had not worked in a commercial game studio previously. I learned a lot from our collaborators about project management, clean code, and more. Working with this crew was an absolute blast.
Below is an outline of what our technical team looked like. I have ommitted personal details about these folks for their privacy, but include some information about their backgrounds.
Management
Myself, Cofounder, Director, Designer, Developer
- Worked with our technical program manager to run ops, including writing tickets, sprint planning, sprint retro, etc.
- Wrote detailed design docs to define and facilitate the work of other devs on the project
- prototyped and tested new designs.
- Gameplay Programming & Prototyping
Conducted Code Reviews
Character Controllers
Items and Tools
Plant, Weather, Ecology Systems,
Fire Propagation (unity Jobs system)
Instancing for plants,
Building Systems,
UI Systems
Prototype Assets
Shaders & shader prototyping with Shadergraph
My Partner, Cofounder, Designer, Marketing, Research
- Cofounder
- UI/UX Design, including mockups and screens of game mechanics and scenes.
- Background Research
- Business operations
- Hiring
- Branding
- Marketing
Technical Program Manager (Part Time)
Had extensive experience as a software developer and product manager/ team lead, primarily working on mobile apps. As we scaled up our team, our TPM became a totally invaluable part of the team.
Had extensive experience as a software developer and product manager/ team lead, primarily working on mobile apps. As we scaled up our team, our TPM became a totally invaluable part of the team.
- Assisted with and eventually took over business operations
- Hiring
- Managed internal comms to team
- Managed production operations with scrum / agile
- Advised on project management
Technical
Senior Technical Designer (Full Time)
Had extensive previous experience as an engineer at a FAANG company, and at a major game studio on an open world live service game.
Had extensive previous experience as an engineer at a FAANG company, and at a major game studio on an open world live service game.
- Advising on implementation details & software design,
- Terrain and instancing optimizations, including terrain chunking for a larger environment
- Adapting existing game mechanics to support online play with Unity Netcode and Relay
Technical Artist (Part Time, ad-hoc)
A then-recent graduate with a degree in Computer Science, and some experience at a large game studio studio.
A then-recent graduate with a degree in Computer Science, and some experience at a large game studio studio.
- Custom Shaders for
Plants
Fire
Sky and Weather
- First pass of fire propagation system with Unity Jobs system
- Advising on graphics optimizations.
Gameplay Engineer (Part Time)
Had extensive experience as a game developer, with credits on a handful of celebrated indie games, moonlighting with us while working another full time job.
Had extensive experience as a game developer, with credits on a handful of celebrated indie games, moonlighting with us while working another full time job.
- Advising on implementation details and software design,
- Menu and UI
- Crafting System
- Inventory System
- Items and Tools (including wearable ‘equipment’)
- Light Roleplaying / Survival Systems
Gameplay Engineer (Part Time)
A junior developer with a background in design. We only got to work with them for just a couple of months before we had to close down the studio.
A junior developer with a background in design. We only got to work with them for just a couple of months before we had to close down the studio.
- Construction Systems
- Started on money and core player progression systems.
Art
Developing our art pipeline was a big challenge, and sadly not something we were able to really succeed at before we had to close down, in spite of working with some great talents.Concept Painter (Part Time)
An artist and illustrator who publishes comics, zines, and fine art prints. We sadly weren’t able to integrate most of her designs before we had to close.
An artist and illustrator who publishes comics, zines, and fine art prints. We sadly weren’t able to integrate most of her designs before we had to close.
- Prop design
- plant design
- key art
- character design
3D Character Artist
we spent a long time carefully iterating on one of our character designs, thinking it would be best to nail down the look and process for one before continuing on with our concept painter’s other designs
we spent a long time carefully iterating on one of our character designs, thinking it would be best to nail down the look and process for one before continuing on with our concept painter’s other designs
- Models, texture paint, and rigging for one character
3D Generalist x2 (Part Time, Ad-Hoc)
Two old friends with experience making 2D and 3D art for indie games.
Two old friends with experience making 2D and 3D art for indie games.
- Models and texture paint for trees, tools,and other props. Many of these assets are used in our prototypes.
Marketing
For a brief time, we had hired 3 marketing professionals to assist with social media accounts and soforth. We quickly realized we had scaled our team in this area too quickly, too soon, so we let two of those three people go.We continued with one person, who worked part time and helped run our discord, set us up with our other social media, and did some work on research and narrative for the game.