Professional Project: Cheese Ramen Games developing 'Al Andalus'

As part of my current course of studies, during the latter half of the third year, we are organised into groups and required to work with an outside 'client' on a piece of work of their choosing (titled the 'Professional Project' module).

I was organised into a team, eventually titled 'Cheese Ramen Games' under the client Gary McCartan, CEO of Pocket Sized Hands.

My role in the team was as Narrative and UI Designer as well as Team Lead.

The client has the desire for a narrative-driven game that would be used to teach 12 to 16-year-old students about the history of Islamic Spain while also teaching the player the difficulty of leading, with morality being a key topic to explore.

The game was designed to have multiple values that the player was trying to balance (food, gold, happiness, etc.). The player would be given scenarios and ask them to make a choice that would adjust the variables.

The narrative I wrote was designed to suit the medieval setting of the game as well as invoke the player to make choices of morality. Therefore the language was intended to be slightly older, more poetic and the scenarios to be situations where no choice is specifically the best or obvious choice. An example can be seen below.

The other main role was to develop the UI. This was my first excursion into UI development and therefore I learned a great deal from it. I took the opportunity to take my initial designs to my professors (specifically Gaz Robinson and Robin Griffiths) and teammates for feedback and with this information adjusted to make the UI more attractive to the demographic. Mobile games were the big inspiration behind the UI designs based on research that the chosen demographic are more involved with mobile games than PC.

The first image below is the original wireframing with feedback given by professors and teammates followed by my second wireframing document. There were further minor adjustments later in development but these weren't substantial enough to build a third version of this documentation.

Lastly, my other role was as Team Lead. It was very straight-forward, my responsibilities as team lead were to organise the meetings (we had three types of meetings, development team only meetings, development team meetings with our academic advisor Gaz Robinson, and also development team meetings with our client), and also to organise the tasks for the scrum and check-in with each team member individually throughout scrum periods to make sure they were progressing and happy.

Due to NDA, this game is not available to play but I am allowed to show and discuss my work on the project freely.