Madhouse Productions
Gameplay Programmer (Contractor)
Within Madhouse productions I contributed on two commercial games in teams between 5 and 12 people. The first project, Area-14, was a 6 year old running game, I was originally onboarded to this game to help maintain the playerbase and ship off the last handful of updates before moving onto the next project.
Madhouse Productions was happy with my performance on Area-14. I was also brought on their follow up title (unannounced). Here I continued to work on creating core systems, but due to my NDA I can't share as much about the work I did produce until release.
Madhouse Productions was happy with my performance on Area-14. I was also brought on their follow up title (unannounced). Here I continued to work on creating core systems, but due to my NDA I can't share as much about the work I did produce until release.
Area-14
Designing, implementing and maintaining gameplay
Reactor
Area-14 was 6 years old by the time I started working on it, my first contract was for creating an interactive nuclear reactor. The reactor had to be interesting for 2 types of players, this project taught me how to work with different parts of a community and balancing different playstyles.
I went through the phases of taking a creative brief into a prototype, releasing and playtesting with specific community parts and releasing with post release updates and improvements.
I went through the phases of taking a creative brief into a prototype, releasing and playtesting with specific community parts and releasing with post release updates and improvements.
Creative brief to prototype
This being my first contractor job taught me a lot, I got into the habit of meeting with the developer lead and keeping the team I was working for updated even though everything had to be done remotely. I documented my implementation and tools I created for my work which set a new standard within the team and producing beyond the scope of the creative brief due to how dynamic my code was. After 2 months of work the client was satisfied with my work and I was tasked to now handle playtesting and validating the system to create the final iteration.
Playtesting
Due to the nature of the genre I was working in playtesting was separated into 2 sections, isolated gameplay playtest. Since the reactor had to be fun as a mechanic on its own for the "Engineering" playerbase I first tested this, contacting players of different skill levels within this playerbase to test out the reactor. I went through a couple of cycles of testing, working on QoL (Quality of Life) improvements till this playerbase was happy with the gameplay loop.
Secondly there was integrated playtesting, in which the Engineering gameplay plays a role in the larger system of the game. For this we did public tests where anyone was allowed to join, this showed how well it was integrated and if any improvements should be made on a broader level of the design. This testing largely came back already positive with few improvements needed, after 3 playtests of this variety we went onto release and post-release support.
Secondly there was integrated playtesting, in which the Engineering gameplay plays a role in the larger system of the game. For this we did public tests where anyone was allowed to join, this showed how well it was integrated and if any improvements should be made on a broader level of the design. This testing largely came back already positive with few improvements needed, after 3 playtests of this variety we went onto release and post-release support.
Post release support
My client was happy with the work I had done, giving me new contracts and letting me integrate even more into the team. In this new position I was also tasked with monitoring and updating the reactor in the future. For example a small issue arose, while in the original engineering playtests the reactor was regarded as difficult, with time the playerbase learned to perfect its interactions with it. I managed to address this by adding more chaos into the system while keeping the interactions with the system reliable. I also added a special event for when a lot of Engineering players were online as to balance out the numbers.