Logline:
The Glitch Witch is a cozy retrofuture puzzle-adventure that takes place in a future devoid of functioning technology.
Rosette begins repairing broken technology in a series of circuit puzzles and is thrilled to discover the mysterious power contained within. At least, until the people in town start accusing her of witchcraft.
Will Rosette be able to change their minds by building friendships and solving their problems? Or will she be forced to choose between her power and her community?
Role & Responsibilities: Production/Management: - Nickey was the Lead Producer on this project. He was in charge of noting down tasks and task assignment in order to ensure that task communication was clear.
- He attended team meetings, took detailed notes, answered questions, and ensured inter-team communication flowed.
- Additionally, he worked closely with the creative director Lizby Dingus to keep track of scope, advisor feedback, and make production related suggestions to ensure a solid release on schedule.
- They also worked together to create team celebration events at the various milestones and holidays!
Lessons Learned Hard Skills: Notion, Google Suite, Miro, Discord, Perforce
Soft Skills: Importance of task ownership
- Team members are generally more productive when they view a feature, task, or asset as their own direct contribution to the project.
- Communicating with team members and inquiring what task they’d like to accomplish enabled this ownership to lead to greater productivity.
- Equally as important as enabling task ownership is clear communication about acceptable criteria for task completion.
Communication on a Big Team and Navigating interpersonal dynamics
- Halfway through the development timeline, we changed our meeting schedule to a weekly all hands with co-working time.
- When the team is able to see the game’s progress each week, they’ll feel more empowered to complete their work and consider the bigger picture of the project.
- When conflicts do arise (especially public conflicts), clear communication about project goals, task acceptable criteria, and presenting a united front as leadership are essential.
Concentric development and cutting scope.
- This game really benefited from understanding and working with concentric development.
- It’s better to have a polished, small game, than a buggy large one.
Ease of known tools vs efficiency of learning unknown tools
- In an effort to ease our narrative team’s workload, we set up a narrative implementation pipeline that would directly take data from Miro and create the scene in engine, and after a test early on in the development cycle results looked promising.
- Developing this tool and learning how to use it within unreal ended up causing massive production setbacks very late in the development cycle, leading to major narrative scope cuts.
- Even if a tool is inefficient, it may be better in the long-run to use known tools than to develop a theoretically more efficient unknown tool.
Footage of Creative Director Lizby Dingus debuting the game at USC Games Expo in 2024:
Team:
Creative Director
Moss Dooley
Co-Lead Narrative
Autumn Chan
Engineer
Eliot Daewon Kim
Artist
Jessica Xu
Artist
Xiaoyi Guan
Marketing
Thesis Chair
Katy Kellenberg
Co-Lead Narrative
Randall Wang
Engineer
Jalen Montgomery
Artist
Christine Faith Hamilton
Artist
Steven Jenny
Composer
Academic Advisor
Bryan Sng
Lead Designer
Yuxing Zhou
Engineer
Carolina Herrera
Artist
Jasmine Fan
Artist
Austin Burkett
Audio Engineer
External Advisor
Melody Guo
Designer
Madelyn Kwon
Art Director
Arianne De Trenck
Artist
Linda Tam
Lead UI/UX Designer
Dominik Kalajdzic
Sound Designer
Lead Producer
Billy Wang
Designer
Jordan Hanes
Art Producer
Cyanide Yang
Artist
Izzi Ferdico
Lead Usability
David Marinas
Lead QA
Producer
Elaine Toh
Lead Engineer
Tamilyn Ayabe
Artist
Jace Clowdus
Artist
Brian Bouzari
Lead Marketing