— PROJECT NAME

Factory Reset

— ROLE

Project Lead

Gameplay Engineer

Technical Designer

— DATE

01/23 – 05/23

— LINK

Factory Reset is a tactical, robot-building roguelite game made in Unity as a capstone project for MSU’s Game Design Minor. I served as the team’s Producer, Lead Designer, and Effect Engineer. This was one of my first leadership positions on medium-sized team and it provided me with valuable experience sprint planning, scoping, and people managing. Additionally, throughout development we met weekly with a team of professional game developers who acted as our clients and advisors.

As you can see from the screenshots, Factory Reset is quite a complicated game with lots of room for strategy and build planning. Because of the high level of complexity of it’s systems, we had to really hone in the player onboarding experience. Our biggest priority was displaying important information when the player needed it and balancing that with not overwhelming them. We developed a robust tooltip system for all the items in the game as well as made sure all available actions for the player were as responsive as possible. Eventually, with months of iteration and playtesting, new players started to ask less questions and were naturally taking on the intricate enemy encounters with ease. By the end of the project, we had an extremely juicey, responsive, and most importantly fun gameplay experience.

Finishing Factory Reset and presenting it was easily one of my highlights from my time at MSU. I was so proud of what the team was able to put together over the course of a very busy semester. Out of all 5 teams in the class, we won the Excellence in Design Award from our professors which was the icing on the cake of this extremely challenging, but rewarding project.