Shawnna O'Neil
Game Producer
HOUSEKEEPING
This shows the HouseKeeping living room. Many of the items are in disarray because of the cat.
This shows the HouseKeeping Bathroom, were tubs and toilets are overflowing.
ROLE
Producer & Level Designer
DESCRIPTION
HouseKeeping is an isometric party game about cleaning a house. However, your friends can be your worst enemy by trying to destroy your progress as Cats. Whichever team makes the most progress wins.
YEAR
2023
GENRE
Isometric Party Game
Skills
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Agile Scrum
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Product Management
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Level Design
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Trello
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Playtesting
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Unity
PLATFORM
PC
This video is showcasing HouseKeeping
Level Design
Paper Maps
For HouseKeeping I created multiple Paper maps during our in-person meetings. I then showed them to the team and we decided on the best paper map. I then took this into Unity and built it all up as seen above. I then got feedback from team-members which I iterated on to create the "Final Iteration" for the Main Level.
My responsibilities of producing these iterations helped the team immensely in deciding what we wanted to do.
I learned a lot of lessons from creating these paper maps. One of them being: If you think its good, then playtest it. This is because it may not feel right to players actually playing than what you originally thought.
This shows my third iteration for a Tutorial Level in HouseKeeping. This ended up actually transforming into the "Main Level".
This shows my second iteration for the Main level. The only thing that remained of this iteration was the front porch.
Level Design Doc
This document shows HouseKeeping and how I went about creating the level. Overall I was able to show this to the team and get feedback on this to iterate on.
Documents created for HouseKeeping:
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Risk Analysis
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Meeting Agenda's
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SWOT Analysis
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Playtesting Documentation
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Game Design Document
Production
Risk Analysis was one of the most important aspects of being a Producer. At the beginning of the project I created a Risk Analysis sheet. Showing our Risks and how to mitigate them. Here you will see my documentation regarding the Risk Analysis.
I was responsible for creating Meeting agendas. This was one of the main elements that helped keep my team on track. To keep moving forward and to keep organized.
I was responsible for creating this SWOT analysis. Figuring out the team's strengths and weaknesses along with what opportunities and threats we might come across. It was definitely a challenge to overcome so early on however it was worth it in the end.
As the Producer I was responsible for creating the Game Design Document. Due to only having three other Designers each of us worked on our own section. I was able to gain experience from this by giving feedback to team members on what else they can add to the Game Design Document.
I was responsible for creating and updating playtesting documentation. Every playtest would be a new document for the team to see the feedback and iterate on that feedback. This feedback would also be used to create Trello cards. This PDF shows an example of one of my Playtesting documents.
Scrum & Trello
For HouseKeeping we used Trello as our main form of Agile scrum. Each iteration cycle team-members were required to move their own cards into the "Done Sprint" list when finished. I also assigned "Story Points" based on the difficulty of the task.
I was responsible for keeping this Trello and scrum cycle up to date for team members to look at and iterate on.
Creating this Trello had given me a great lesson on how to be specific and detail oriented, when creating these Trello cards.
This is a real example of how I had set up the HouseKeeping Trello Board. Each discipline had its own Trello board set up like this.
HouseKeeping went through multiple iterations of Playtesting. We began by creating a prototype and handing it off to random people to try out. We would get feedback from those folks and then iterate on that feedback.
I created documentation as seen above documenting all feedback we had gotten from that playtest. It may have taken a while but we had finally gotten through enough iterations for people to start understanding what they are doing.
Doing these playtests gave me so much experience on how to document playtests moving forward.
