Riverflow

Context

This project is the main project made during my fourth year of game design studies at Rubika SupInfoGame. It was developed in a team of 5 people during a year, from October 2021 to February 2022.

Description

Riverflow is a cozy puzzle game inspired by Mini Metro and Mini Motorways from Dinosaur Polo Club studio. The goal of the game is to draw rivers that will water trees and flowers of growing forests. Take care of the water flow, drawing junctions to your rivers will reduce the water efficiency in dry lands. Use items earned by successfully watering trees for long enough to make your task easier.

My works

At the start of the project, I worked with the Project Lead to define better the game design of the project. We work together, shared many ideas and started to write a documentation for the rest of the team.

To help organizing the team, I made a dashboard on Google Sheets that allowed us to add tasks, assign them to team members and evaluate their difficulties. This dashboard was used by the Team Lead to share planning week after week, following an agile process. The planner embed an evaluation system to alert the Team Lead if someone had too much work and helped to avoid some crunch situations.

During the early development phase, I worked with game designers to build up the game systems. I used spreadsheets and the online tool Machinations to create simulations of the game economy. Those simulations were useful to iterate quickly and find a good balance in our systems. I also help developing some game feature in Unity using C#.

As soon as we successfully got some playable builds, I handled playtests. I wrote a generic protocol and some other more specific protocols when we needed to test precise features of the game. I was in charge to analyze the feedback of players (qualitative and quantitative) and came up with reports, synthesizing the playtest to the rest of the team.

Conclusion

This project was pleasant to do with a good balance between all my skills for a small-scoped project. The game was also made to be published to Steam on a later date, but for now we did not publish it. We wanted to improve the game feel first that could be better.