Production Overview
- Six months
- 1200 man hours
- One Producer
- Two Designers
- Four Artists
- Two Programmers
- One QA Lead
Created over a period of just over six months and 1200 man hours Requiem was a project created as a senior thesis, and one of the four projects I worked on in my last semester at Champlain College.
Producer / Designer – Joel Pelletier
Lead Artist – Dan Peavey
Lead Designer – Auston Montville
Artist – Taylor Bjorndahl
Artist – Dan Hart
Artist – Husam Al-Ziab
Designer – Rob Witbeck
Programmer – Alex Tabor
Lead QA – Douglas Miller
Assistant Programmer – Dan Rossi
Cinematic Artist – Ryan Fitton
My Responsibilities as Lead QA
- Personally perform verification & validation testing on the title
- Assemble and manage a team of testers in regular bi-weekly sessions
- Provide feedback to the design team in a concise and accessible manner
- Consult the design team on a wide variety of topics
As the Quality Assurance Lead I was responsible not only for personally testing the game myself, but also organizing a group of nearly 50 individuals in the testing of of Requiem and 3 other titles over the course of just over three months. I was brought onto the project halfway through the production cycle in order to provide the feedback and testing that are so important to crafting a finely tuned and polished experience. Using tools like Facebook, Twitter and Unfuddle, I organized and executed bi-weekly testing sessions with testers ranging from students of game design, art and programming to student gamers pursuing more typical majors and non-gamers. This wide range of testers allowed for the depth and breadth of feedback that the design team required to craft a vertical shooter intended to appeal to a broader audience than most.
Employing a variety of methods I was able to provide verification testing to catch game-breaking bugs and validation testing to help balance the game’s design to the user’s expectations. Organization played a crucial role in my work, as compiling the large amount of feedback into something concise and easily accessible for the design team was paramount. Consulting the team on a personal basis was necessary, and my and my teams feedback was used to help balance difficulty and fine-tune upgrade potency and tweak itemization costs. In addition to my role as Lead QA I also assisted in minor polishing efforts late in the production cycle, including providing scripting solutions.
Overview of the Game
Requiem is a vertical shooter or sh’mup choreographed to the musical works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in particular his last mass “Requiem.” Attempting to break the game out of a genre standard of only appealing to a niche hardcore audience due to the often tedious game loop that can leave players at an impasse, Requiem was designed in a way that encourages players to make repeated attempts on a level by providing not only scalable difficulty, but also providing the player with a performance based resource that promotes skillful play and provides a variety of upgrades that can be purchased to modify the player’s ship, thus allowing them to overcome more difficult obstacles.
Designed with the hardcore and casual player in mind Requiem can be taken in bite sized chunks, or in large sit-downs and features arcade-style multiplayer, where a second player can jump in at any time, either as a guest, or with an existing account.
