Dragon Daycare is a couch co-op game meant to be played with 2-4 players. You take care of cute feisty dragons. Cater to their every need, giving them the love they oh so deserve. Besides, you won't like what you see when you get them angry.
My roles in this project were:
- Programmer
- Producer
- Game Designer
- Sound Designer
- small help in 3D modelling
My programming tasks tended to be creating the supporting systems around the game including but not limited to: Dragon Seating, Player Fire, Rating Calculation, UI navigation, Day time cycle, Trash spawning, Parent Pickup, Dragon Dropoff, Dragon Needs, Player Feedback, and more!
For the Game Design of Dragon Daycare, we decided on a fluctuating chaos model. Where throughout the day. The amount of tasks the players need to handle would fluctuate. We would control this with events tied to the progression of the day.
We spent a lot of time on onboarding, we didn't want big arrows flashing towards points of interest. Or bulky text blocking the already busy screen of a couch co-op game. So we decided to guide the players through all the elements in a more subtle way. A good example of this is where at the beginning of the day trash spawns. So the players can practise the gesture tasks without any repercussions.
As the producer for this project. I was tasked with managing the overall project, reminding people to log their hours. Hosting the meetings, creating the meeting reports, making the builds, managing the itch page, and most importantly steering the project in the right direction.
In the end I am really happy with how the project turned out. It taught me a lot of valuable soft skills. And made me realise how different working with a group on a professional project is. If there was one thing I would change it would be how we handled bugs. We pushed them to the back too much. Causing a lot of frantic fixing at the end.
Team members:
- Noor Briké / Programmer
- Cosmo Verstraeten / Programmer
- Sara Gordon / Artist
- Trisha Lui / Artist
- Luka Van Der Weeën
