Live/Wire is a unique and dynamic competitive multiplayer FPS with a cyberpunk edge. The game’s core mechanic is that, rather than using traditional guns which fire bullets, players would instead wield electricity-powered “shock guns”, which must be recharged by plugging them into outlets scattered throughout the arena. The player’s plug would also double as a grappling hook, allowing them to swing about the environment with great speed and agility. These two mechanics in tandem with one another would provide a fast-paced, skill-intensive rhythm of combat that would reward speed, accuracy, and aggression. Additionally, the game would separate itself aesthetically from the bland, more realistic-looking shooters on the market by taking inspiration from gritty comic book art styles, as well as the dingy techno-futurist metropolises of cyberpunk fiction.
Our team is currently made up of 16 people all working remotely together during our Spring Semester. We are looking to publish Live/Wire for free on Steam at the end of our semester in May.
For this project, I was the Project Lead and Lead Producer. My responsibilities included planning and running our meeting, onboarding new team members, preparing our game for Steam release, facilitating communication between the team and external stakeholders, facilitating communication between the team in a virtual environment, clearing up disputes between team members, and any impediments the team runs into.
One of the problems our team ran into early on in our second semester of development was communication issues between our leads and out level design team. We found that the level design team were hearing different guidelines from different leads about the level design and they were confused about what they should be doing the first few weeks of the project. Once they let their confusion known, we found that the main problem was that communication between the leads about level design was the root problem. I planned a re-centering meeting about level design for our leads and the designers. We then took a Sprint to plan out exactly how we wanted our level to look and figured out the scale of the level. This helped us a lot down the line when we started making our tutorial and our main multiplayer level over again.
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