Strings of Convergence
- Andrew Freer
- Apr 4, 2025
- 2 min read
A jRPG intro level.
Play as Finn Serenade, a struggling musician, who is dragged to another world where he is expected to battle monsters for the entertainment of a warmongering alien overlord.
He teams up with a dwarven warrior and an elvish mage in hopes of ending this death game and return to his world.
Project Responsibilities
Role 1: Project Coordinator & Producer
Implemented Agile methodologies to define clear requirements, timelines, and tasks, organizing weekly sprints to meet bi-weekly project milestones.
Created and maintained a comprehensive Confluence hub, including the Game Design Document (GDD), Technical Design Document (TDD), and a Master Asset List for team-wide reference.
Utilized Trello for Kanban-style task tracking, ensuring smooth workflow and visibility across all disciplines.
Oversaw project scope and applied risk mitigation strategies to maintain alignment with goals and deadlines.
Facilitated SCRUM meetings daily and maintained consistent daily written communication to ensure team alignment and progress transparency.
Role 2: Programmer
Initialized the project in Unreal Engine and established version control using Perforce (P4V).
Developed core gameplay systems using Blueprints, including a custom battle system built with Actor Components and Data Tables.
Designed and implemented level layouts and a persistent Game Instance state machine to manage interactable objects, enemies, and save functionality.
Integrated assets from other team members, ensuring visual consistency and functional implementation within the project.
Challenges & Retrospective
Balancing programming responsibilities with project coordination presented challenges, leading us to reallocate all sound-related programming and dialogue system tasks to the sound designer.
Following the loss of our environment artist, our technical artist stepped into the role of level designer, while we outsourced environment assets to maintain visual quality.
With only one character artist/animator on the team, we strategically reused the Golem from our Cylence project and designed the other enemies as Niagara effects to ensure sufficient time for modeling and animating the protagonists.
To stay on schedule, we made careful scope adjustments—reducing the number of enemy types and attacks, streamlining the dialogue into a linear format, and reimagining the boss battle as a horde encounter rather than a single giant enemy.
In response to feedback, we minimized lengthy dialogue sequences by converting select lines into reactive barks, allowing character interactions to unfold more naturally as ambient banter during gameplay.
Closing Thoughts
This was a great challenge and, for the limited timeline, we managed to create something that we can be proud of and learnt many lessons and technical approaches along the way.
Comments