DARE Academy: Queer <coded> Games developing 'Homebound'

In May (2021) I attended a talk given by Dr Love and Dr Galloway about Abertay University's large summer games development competition, 'DARE Academy'.

I reached out to a handful of artists and developers I know and built a team around diversity and the desire to communicate stories about gender identity which we hadn't seen in popular media. From this Queer <coded> Games was born and 'Homebound: Raleigh the Troops' began development.

My work was as Narrative and Level Designer on 'Homebound' specifically and as Team Lead for Queer <coded> Games.

For my narrative work, I worked with Jay to build a system where I could write the dialogue in such a manner that it would be directly uploaded to the prototype with minimum fuss. This required me to lay out the writing in a specific manner and saved a great deal of production time overall. An example of the layout and my writing can be seen below.

The level design was also my responsibility. I developed the village layout evolving out from the central building, in this instance The Church. The aim of the design was to encourage the player to explore, so the golden path was curvy and not as sign-posted as I have designed in my previous work. Also, I designed things to sit in such a way that they appeared just on the end of the player's camera, leading them away from the golden path to sate their curiosity.

While it was not a formal role I had, I was skilled enough to occasionally assist in in-engine development and in graphic design work. My first design for the project was our team logo, which was designed to represent both our LGBTQIA+ description as well as being in computer tech. Also, it was desired to be easy to read due to our background interest in being as accessible as possible to those with dyslexia or other similar reading problems.

Towards the end of the project, I developed the opening menu scene and the buttons required for it. I aimed to design them to fit with the background that was designed by Maya Claypool, a contractor involved in assisting us with a selection of art assets. All the buttons were designed to be matching to the below example.

I should note that the full animation was broken down into component parts for the user in game. The button should half decompress when the cursor hovered over it and then fully compress with a click, better communicating to the player what they were about to select.

Finally, my umbrella role with Queer <coded> is as the team lead.

In that role, my jobs are as follows. I am responsible for all communications coming to the team with the university, merchandise distributor and anybody else contacting us for information. This means having access to our formal email account, responding quickly and formally but has extended to also running the social media accounts (Twitter is the main account, as well as a Twitch account) and also managing lines of communication inside the team, which is mostly a Discord server. Also, I am in charge of the merchandising for our group (both the design and issuing), for which we have received much praise.

Lastly, while it connects to my team lead role, my blurriest job has been in assisting each of my members occasionally when required. This could be anything from calling them and helping to organise them with clear expectations for the next scrum, to fetching medicine when a member was ill and had nobody else to help them.

I'm very proud of my work with Queer <coded> Games, it is greatly fulfilling and has allowed me to concentrate on a singular project at a time for the first time. If you desire to play the game, 'Homebound' can be accessed here and Queer <coded>'s Twitter is available here.