MNEMONIC - Project Production Insight

MNEMONIC is a First-Person roguelite game featuring fast paced gameplay where the player must use a combination of combat and parkour skills in order to reach their objectives. The longer the player spends in a single area of the level, the more corruption will begin to accumulate, resulting in the player having to receive debuffs that will be taken into account in the next area.
The player must find a way to juggle speed and exploration in order to achieve their goals.

MNEMONIC is a project I worked on during my time at George Brown College’s Post-Grad Game Design program. The project started as a pitch presented during a game jam with the theme “Sacrifices Must be Made”, in less than a week me and my team created a playable prototype to demonstrate the game’s mechanics.
When official development began we created roles for our team, as well as hired specialized undergraduate students in order to begin developing a vertical slice that would be delivered roughly five and a half months later in April.

During the development cycle I learned more about the different disciplines in game development, and got the opportunity to lead a team of undergrad programmers in order to complete related tasks.
The project was very fun to work on and allowed me to learn more about game design, development, and production.

Basic Level - MNEMONIC Initial Prototype

Planning and Initial Prototyping

The George Brown College Game Design program’s first semester consisted of regular course work as well as several game jams. Each game jam had specific themes, intended scope sizes, and different teams. The very first game jam theme was “Sacrifices Must be Made”, additionally, all teams were randomized meaning most people were working with others they had not yet worked with up to that point.
The initial team consisted of myself, an additional game designer, and two Post-Grad concept art students, immediately we scheduled a meeting, introduced ourselves, and began planning our game.

We knew we wanted to create some kind of roguelike game, so we began thinking of ways to implement the idea of sacrifice into the game. When laying out the framework for the rules of the game, we wanted to focus the idea of sacrifice between playstyles the player would need to incorporate in order to succeed, primarily the idea of speed and exploration, this was how MNEMONIC’s “Corruption” system was created.

At the beginning the primary element we had was the speed/exploration aspect, I knew I would be able to create a functioning prototype for the pitch so we focused on creating those systems in the prototype and adding additional features we thought would fit.

Gate and Strikes - MNEMONIC Initial Prototype

One of the key things that added to the project was adding in more advanced movement options for the player, such as wall running and double jump. Originally I added this just as an extra thing for the player to have fun with, as well as to have additional elements I could have be affected by the roguelite elements in the game. This ended up being something the rest of the team unanimously agreed added to our project and helped make it unique in a genre that already has a large variety in gameplay.

Once we had our core systems in place and the prototype finished, we pitched the game and were among the first projects to be greenlit, meaning production would now begin.

Pre-Production

During pre-production we spent most of our time figuring out what resources we needed, what the art direction would be like, and what we would try to have accomplished in the short period we had to develop the project. I was given the role of Technical Director, primarily due to my previous experience with game programming and my existing knowledge of Unreal Engine 4, the engine we had decided to create the game in.

After the pitch, we had received offers of assistance from undergrads that were interested in working on the project, with a set of task and resources now available production on the game began.

MNEMONIC Tutorial Level

Production

During production the team typically had meetings every week, as well as team leads having an additional meeting to go over production and make decisions regarding art and design for the project. We had team members that left, and some that were not always available, however, this was to be expected considering this was a school project. Near the beginning of production an additional Post-Grad game designer had joined our team, which helped immensely as we were able to reduce the workload me and the original game designer had attempted to balance.

During production we used Trello to organize tasks and had a Google Drive to hold our art assets.

I was in charge of implementing the assets into the engine, managing our project repository, and implementing game design elements into the engine. Near the later stage of development, most of our programmers were unavailable due to school work, I then needed to begin adding in more pieces we were missing, as well as fixing minor bugs that were present in the C++ code.

Once we were beginning to see our available development time dwindling, we decided to restructure what was going to be available for our initial prototype, which meant adding features and a level to our backlog to be developed in the future. The difficult part about this was that because our game is a roguelite and much of the game’s uniqueness lies in it’s Corruption system, we would not be able to properly demonstrate those features and show the player why our gameloop is so interesting. We decided that focusing on a polished section of the game that can atleast demonstrate a key part of the gameplay would be better. Therefore, the new goal for the deliverable was to have a polished tutorial level that is focused on teaching the player about their movement abilities.

MNEMONIC Tutorial Level

Playtesting and Feedback

During the final stretch of development we had a brief amount of time to work on playtesting and feedback for the tutorial. When we had our initial build we knew we were still missing certain parts of the tutorial, but we also wanted to get feedback regarding the player character’s movement.

Some of the important feedback we got included: “The sprint button is awkward.”, “Climbing is too difficult.”, “It is fun to go fast.”, and “The music is really calming.”. All of this feedback was something we focused on when we were creating our next build for the game, we decided to look at each of these points and find the reason as to why the player might think that way.

For sprinting, we decided to remove the button that was required to sprint, it didn’t make much sense to press and hold a button for an ability the player would probably be using 90% of the time anyways. It also meant that we could free that input to be used for something else in the future.

Climbing being too difficult was something we addressed as well, we increased the climb speed and decreased the amount of gravity that affected the player when they begin climbing. Movement is something we are still looking at even now, as it is a crucial part of our game and making the movement feel tight and giving the player that control is very important to the game as well as our intention as designers.

The other set of feedback we got was the game being fun when the player is going fast, as well as the music being calming. “Fun to do fast” is one of MNEMONIC’s original game pillars that we set, meaning we were happy to see we were still leaning on that original vision. As for the music being calming, although music was something we added in last minute, it still stressed the importance of all aspects in regards to player feedback and how the player interprets the game world.

Project Retrospect

As the Winter school semester ended, we focused on creating a more polished version of the build and the tutorial level, as well as implementing quality of life changes we had wanted to make regarding the feedback we had received earlier. Looking back on the project in its current state, I and the rest of the team are very happy with where it is. MNEMONIC was nominated for “Best Game” at George Brown College’s Year End Show, and we plan on continuing development of the game throughout the Summer.

MNEMONIC is now another group project I have had the pleasure of working on, and I learned many different parts of game development. MNEMONIC was my first time working on a team with various disciplines, and it offered me another chance to have a leadership role and improve my skills. The project also stressed to me the importance of the pre-production phase, as if you don’t know already, it is very important!

Finally, I would like to offer my thanks to everyone on the team that worked hard on creating what we have now for MNEMONIC, as well as everyone that gave us critical feedback that allowed us to make our game even better. We plan on continuing development into the Summer, and there is even the potential that MNEMONIC will be picked up by students that will attend George Brown College’s Game Design program in the future!

I am so happy we were able to create something the team, and those that play the game find fun.

Please look forward to additional posts on my blog, where I hope to write more about MNEMONIC and go deeper into the systems that make the game unique.