Technical Game Designer, UX Designer - Inside The Mirror

Starting a Company Is Tough

Stairs Productions was founded by myself and a couple close friends to give our projects, passion, and ideas a platform to stand on in the world. Our founding goal is to produce games from start to finish that impact our players positively, no matter how many we reach.
Our flagship game Inside The Mirror was our attempt to reach out to those suffering from mental illness, as well as their friends and family, and break down the walls built by stigma. Everyone on the team had experience with mental illness in one way or another, which made this project very personal. This of course had its good, bad, and ugly sides which I’ll go through below.

My Role(s)

A little bit of everything…

The blessing and curse of working at a tiny indie studio is that you get to dig your hands into a little bit of everything. Below is a list of my roles and responsibilities on Inside the Mirror, but I’m probably missing something in the myriad of shoes that I filled.

Technical / Design

Designed the main user experience by creating content requests for the various content teams (audio/art) after evaluating the narrative and establishing a desired aesthetic for story bits
Iterated on UX design and story flow through closed playtest feedback
Implemented various content (sprites, background art, music tracks, sound effects) into the Unity narrative plugin: Fungus
Scripted scene transitions, effects timing
Logic scripting for the game: save game logic, gating, pathways
Troubleshooted said implemented logic
General C# scripting / debugging
Managed source control depot
Led the publishing effort on Steam, worked with the steamworks publishing tool to finalize builds and launch the game

Collaboration

Established art content pipeline (request format, file expectations, integration process, general implementation)
Established music / sfx content pipeline (request, file expectations, integration process, general implementation)
Worked / synced frequently with artists / musicians to go over expectations, mood words for requested content, fielded design questions, etc..
Worked / synced frequently with the narrative to ensure the creative vision was in sync with the content being requested from myself
Worked frequently with the programming team to ensure technical asks from the design team were feasible / in scope / etc…
Led and organized the bug hunt squad while bringing the title from beta to final

The Good

Working Closely With Trusted Teammates

No matter the challenge, it can be tackled through enough hard work and close collaboration between competent teammates. Luckily, we had no shortage of hard work on this title.

In my role as a technical game designer, my job relied heavily on collaboration between the artist, narrative, and programming teams. Without the good relationships built along the way with our teammates, a project of this scope would have been impossible for us.

Excellent Technical Infrastructure

Our programming team I mentioned above performed some miracles during the production phase of the project. One of which was completely rewriting the audio engine of the Fungus Unity plugin, which at the time was used as the new mainline for the engine overall.
This allowed us to do some very intricate audio tuning and layering, as well as manipulate each audio track separately. That work made for my favorite scene in the entire game, in which the parents are arguing intensely while a passionate violin and piano duet plays in the background. I was able to edit the sound tracks to have the violin play much more loudly with the piano playing more softly when the mother speaks, and vice versa for the father. The intent was to create a sense of back and forth conflict, through the narrative, art sprites, and music. The result was (in my opinion) our best scene of the game.

The Practical Side

Luckily on this project, we already had a large audience due to our lead artist, Pluvias, having a sizable social media presence. This allowed us to get our kickstarter off the ground successfully, as well as have an audience eager to get their hands on our game. While there was a lack of a massive boom of purchases following the release, we still received almost entirely positive reviews across the four platforms we released for: PC, Android, IOS, and Mac. In the end, despite not achieving the return on investment we would have liked to see, we were content that nearly everyone experiencing our story left with positive feelings, which proved we could provide value through our ideas and hard work.

The Bad

Bills To Pay

The unfortunate reality of working on an indie game that does not secure massive funding, is simply that the work is part time and scarce. We all wanted the game to become a reality, but it was only through massive pushes and long hours that we made it actually happen. Each Christmas when I went home to celebrate with my family, I would spend long hours after everyone was asleep working on the project because it was my only large chunk of free time for months. There are dozens of other stories like that, and while I think it was a reality of our situation, it was obviously not ideal. Due to the long hours, and life commitments that could simply not be ignored, our work lagged for weeks or months at a time, leading to…

The Ugly

Burnout

Our day jobs came first, and having a side hustle for months and years on end is exhausting. Burnout was inevitable throughout the various teams. Our motivation, productivity, and direction was stagnant for weeks on end. A massive burden was how out of scope the project became, due largely to the teams’ inexperience. We learned many lessons working together as an indie studio, many of which carry over to the larger studios / companies I’ve worked at, such as Electronics Arts and Magic Leap.

Electronic Arts - Sports

Magic Leap