General Information
Game Summary
In My Spy <3, you take on the role of a secret agent where your goal is to try and figure out among your potential love interests who is actually a undercover spy, and who is genuinely looking for love. You'll have to use deduction skills, time management, and explore multiple dialogue paths to uncover clues and ultimately expose the spies and find true love.
Development Information
Team Size: 7
Project Duration: 20 weeks (September 2021 - January 2022)
Engine: Unity
Platform: Android
Store: Itch.io
Key Features
Combat Trial
Surrounded by enemy Scrappers, the only way out is a shoot-out. Fight for your life and reach the end of the futuristic city.
Time Trial
Stuck in an industrial warehouse filled with turrets and moving obstacles, use your ability to slow down time to reach the exit before the timer runs out.
Final Boss
After completing the other trials go head to head with Ne0 and defeat him to take down the Scrappers and saving the city from the RAID virus.
Project Role & Responsibilities
Main Role: Producer
Secondary Role: UI Designer
Lead and managed workflow for a team of 7 game developers to deliver a high-quality game project on schedule.
Facilitated daily scrums and managed six 3-week sprints for a cross-functional team to ensure project goals and deadlines were met.
Managed formal documentation, project schedules, and milestones, including creating and maintaining design documents.
Performed regular 1-on-1 meetings with members of the team to ensure personal issues/concerns were identified.
Created UI/UX elements for players to use throughout the game, including menus, buttons, and logos.
Phases and Process
When we started this project, the team knew we wanted to create a first person 2D game, but we didn’t originally intend to create a dating simulator, but as we started to create concepts of characters and ideas for the narrative the game just fell into that genre so the team ran with it. The team started to talk about what mechanics we wanted for our dating simulator that could differentiate it from others like it in the genre, which is when we decided to add a puzzle element to it that involved spy’s.
We came up with a simple mechanic where you could use a character's dating profile from a cell phone that could then be cross-referenced when talking with different characters to determine who the spy is. We also wanted to think of different game modes we could have so we brainstormed different modes and came up with a speed dating mode.
As the producer my first priority was ensuring we wouldn’t get too out of scope on the project, so we stuck to only a couple characters and the main story mode first, and would later re-evaluate at later sprints what more could fit into the scope of the project depending on what had already gotten completed.
Concept Phase
Pre-Production Phase
During pre-production we started to create some more narrative for the project and worked on different characters that could work with the theme of the game. We also worked on a basic tutorial for the game to teach the player how to cross-reference information from their dating profile to the dialogue.
At this point in the project we felt like the game needed some more mechanics so the group came up with an annoyance meter. While on the date if you have your phone out too long it fills the meter, and when too full you fail the date. This adds some extra pressure to not have your phone UI up all the time and have to remember the information from the dating profile when questioning or you run the risk of failing the level.
Production Phase
During the production phase we mainly focused on the character creation and designing unique personalities that each could have separate facial expressions depending on what was being said to them. We designed 15 unique characters in total, and had 3 of them designed for a Christmas themed level that was done towards the end of sprint 5.
Throughout the next six sprints, the teams would continue to develop the game until its publication on Itch.io, and I would continually schedule 1-on-1 talks with team members to discuss any issues that they had and I managed to resolve their issues and improve the teams overall productivity. We also committed our last sprint to getting the speed dating mode in so that players could choose between the story mode and speed dating.
The biggest challenge for me with this project was I had never produced a mobile game before, so I didn’t know how difficult it would be to work with such a small amount of space. It was interesting to work with such a confined amount of space and to really push the boundary of what can be done on a smaller screen.
Challenges Encountered
Paris Dating Location Background
By: Kirsten Futch
Tutorial Character
By: Schnerby Jacquet
Tutorial Office Background
By: Kirsten Futch
Character Expression Sheet WIP
By: Rachel Fuller
Dating Profile UI
WIP Screenshot
Maxwell Tabin
