Description
Kindred was a game developed as part of the GAM300/350 module at DigiPen Singapore. It was developed by a team of 11 full-time students over the course of ~9 months, including pre-production and post-production.
It is a 3D narrative platformer where players relive old memories as Father and Son. Playing as each character, they journey through old and warped memories and relive moments of their lives with one another.
Gameplay Video
The below video was recorded as part of SGGA’s Student Portfolio Showcase. There I presented the game to a virtual audience and gave a general overview of the game and its development. Since it is a recording of a recording, the framerate of the game is quite low.
Main Responsibilities
My main contributions to this project were as a Producer, Programmer and Designer.
Production
Production-wise I managed a team of 11: 3 artists, 6 programmers and 2 designers. It was a bigger team than I had previously managed, and I had to quickly learn how to delegate tasks and responsibilities to the leads rather than tracking them myself.
I followed an Agile and Scrum management style, with weekly team meetings to discuss progress, prioritise upcoming tasks and generally as a sync-up point so the team was aware of the project’s progress. I also used a Kanban approach to breaking down and viewing the various tasks of the different departments via Trello.
With a large team, I sought to setup pipelines between each department, linking them to members of importance in other departments. For example, I worked with the Technical Lead/Scripting Programmer to setup a bug reporting system when the Design team would encounter issues with scripting behaviours.
I also ensured that each milestone’s submission was of high quality and as bug-free as possible, QA testing the project at every submission.
Read my personal post-mortem here!
Programming
On the Programming side, I worked on
- Level editor, created with Dear ImGui and had features like
- Drag and drop for asset swapping
- Undo/Redo manager
- Nested tree view of the scene
- Locating and debugging engine-specific bugs.
Design
On the Design side, I worked on
- Scripting gameplay mechanics
- Creating a dialogue and cinematics system
- Assisting with level design
- Designing all cutscenes
I also assisted in editing and providing feedback for the in-game dialogue and audio.
Gallery
Download
Check out the game at the DigiPen Game Gallery.