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The Underbrush

  • Role: Co-Producer, Technical Designer

  • Platforms: Windows, macOS

  • Team Size: 8 with 5 mentors from Blizzard Entertainment 

  • Duration: 16 Weeks

  • Responsibilities:

    • Reporting progress to our Blizzard mentors through Discord and weekly meetings.

    • Helped create and pitch presentations to the class and Blizzard mentors

    • Preparing weekly game builds and updating our webpage for the Blizzard mentors.

    • Managing peer and mentor feedback to be addressed by the team.

    • Assisting in coordinating team meetings and checking in with team progress.

    • Helped complete the various documentation and paperwork needed for our workflow.

    • Leading the design front by designing and documenting a majority of game systems such as the overall game loop, game managers, and cryptid interactions.

    • Programmed a large portion of game aspects such as the character controller, respawn mechanic, and story/dialogue system

    • Collecting and transferring a large portion of art and sound assets made by the team into working game assets and systems.

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Game Summary
"The Underbrush is an 2.5D eerie adventure game where you play as an inquisitive young child who scours the woods in search of mythical cryptids while out camping with their father."

The Underbrush was a student project that I co-led during the Spring semester of 2022. This project started in the last class of my Game Design minor. During this class, we were split into teams of 8 and paired with mentors from 5 different AAA game companies to work with us during the project. Our team was paired with mentors from Blizzard.

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 Industry Mentors 
Our team was paired with five Blizzard developers as our mentors. Working with developers from such an influential studio was an amazing experience that taught me a lot about what it takes to live up to the standards of the gaming industry. I was responsible for making weekly builds of the game for them to play and critique before our weekly meetings to discuss progress and feedback with them. Our mentors also challenged us to create a Project Plan from the very start of the project, in addition to the rest of our documentation. The Project Plan would divide all assets, mechanics, and extraneous tasks related to the entire project, start to finish and then estimate time allocations for each. It allowed us to judge our progress while making sure everyone knows what they needed to do and when. This was a tall task for us, especially at the beginning of production but it helped us a lot in the long run.

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Communication
My primary role was as Co-Producer for the project. I helped lead the team by, coordinating team meetings, managing feedback, maintaining workflow goals, and many more managerial duties. Our project was plagued with many different challenges that required a lot of us producers. It has been the tallest task I've faced to date, but I made it my main goal to focus on collaboration with the members of my team to make quick and effective decisions based on the challenges we faced. I held bi-weekly meetings to discuss our progress and to bounce ideas off each other as well as created a large number of design documents to communicate detailed information about the game for all of the team to reference as they worked. As my first real attempt at being a producer, it took a while to nail down everything but eventually we settled into a solid rhythm.

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