EA Mobile Prototype
At EA Mobile I joined a very small team with just a Game Designer and a Product Manager. We were tasked to come up with as many prototype ideas of what gameplay could look like for an unnamed project. Unfortunately this project is under NDA and I can only talk very high level about it.
As a team we tasked ourselves with creating a build on a weekly cadence with something new to test out. We asked select members of our studio to join us in play testing each build, taking the feedback and quickly adjusting and iterating on the design to see what played better or worse.
I was able to re-learn a lot of gameplay math and physics that I had not done in a while. I also was able to help design new ideas and then take them to the prototype and code them. The project was very exciting to be part of and I'm very proud of how far our small team accomplished in such a short amount of time.
Challenges
Our biggest challenge came from the speed at which we needed to pump out builds. Personally I needed to help with designing the next idea and then I need to engineer it. A lot of the tasks actually required some high level physics and math. We had some old systems I could use to help, but for the most part I was building the AI and core game play from scratch.
We also faced a lot of political challenges from not knowing what direction a big company like EA wanted to go. As a team we were very direct with our findings but without a high level team making quick decisions, ultimately we just ended up in a holding pattern and not being able to pursue this passion project of ours.