Unannounced Projects, Schell Games
Tools: Unity, Photoshop, Illustrator,
Indesign, InVision,
JustInMind, Google Sheets,
Forms, Slides, Docs
Categories: Game Design, Codesign
Summary
Fortunately, at Schell Games, I get to work on a lot of really cool projects. Unfortunately, the timelines for those projects can be months or years and the nature of client work means that we can't always share what's going on under the hood. My projects haven't shipped, so I can't talk specifics! But I can talk skills.
Goals
I work in projects that are in the following phases:
- Early concepting for client or internal pitches (brainstorming, research, insight gathering, interviews, client pitches)
- (Generally maps to the "empathize" step of many design process frameworks)
- Concept work for consultation phases (interviews, on-site audience observations, rapid digital and paper prototyping, playtesting, persona creation, research, user story generation, documentation, systems design)
- (Generally maps to the "empathize," "define," and "ideate" steps of many design process frameworks)
- Concept work for early development phases (paper and digital prototyping, larger-scale playtests, client codesign sessions, team-facing design sessions and activities, design documentation, systems design, level design)
- (Generally maps to the "define," "ideate," "prototype," and "test" steps of many design process frameworks)
- Design for pre-production phase (client codesign sessions, team brainstorms and design sessions, creation of outlines and other artifacts to communicate the design internally and externally to client and team)
- (Generally maps to the "define," "ideate," "prototype," and "test" steps of many design process frameworks)
- Design for production phase (content writing, character design, dialogue writing, playtest planning, usability tests, team brainstorm facilitation)
- (Generally maps to the "define," "ideate," "prototype," and "test" steps of many design process frameworks)
Outcomes and Takeaways
So far, so good! My most recent client just renewed our contract for another year and an additional game, and my most recent pitch was just picked up by a television network, so we'll begin development of those games shortly.
While I can't post specific game-related postmortems at this time, here's a link to codesign takeaways on the blog I wrote after my most-recent client project.