FLUENCY FRIENDS
Gameplay overview Trailer
In this trailer, Erich, the founder of Say It Labs will guide you through the goals of the project, as well as showcase many of our unique minigames.
I joined Say It Labs in March of 2020.
Since then I've positioned myself as the 'go to guy' for knowledge about the project's codebase, design and structure.
Below I've summarized my journey with Say It Labs debut game: Fluency Friends!
EARLY DAYS
I joined the project right after the preproduction stage. A lot of the groundwork for the game's ideas had already been laid. The game would be divided into separate minigames, each teaching you a specific technique on how to train your voice.
I joined a team of three people; With me becoming the second developer on the team. I worked together with Erich, the company founder and Lukas, who works on the game's speech recognition component.
For now, the game consisted of a couple of minigames, a map and a barebones structure for progression. The art style / direction was basic, as we had no artists on the team back then.
THE INITIAL CLEANUP
We were looking into expanding the game as well as the team. But before that a good look at the game's initial code was required. It was written by a single person and unfortunately wasn't very user friendly nor very expandable. On top of that, due to some complications, I was left as the only developer on the team. A big responsibility rested on my shoulders!
I began to rewrite the base structure of the game. Keeping in mind the most important factor; Expandability.
Each minigame would inherit from a clear foundation that plugs in to the speech recognition component of the game. As well as creating structured 'rounds' that can be easily formatted by all the different minigames.
Ex.
BaseInitialization > RoundStart > BeforeLoadingUtterance > OnUtteranceLoaded > ...
THE SECOND DESIGN PHASE
The team was growing! We gained a new developer... Chris! Who I had previously worked with during my internship. (Talk about a comeback!) Multiple Artists joined the team as well, setting the stage for a new look... and a new gameplay flow!
With the help of Chris I was able to finish cleaning up old leftover code in dire need of a refactor. We felt confident and ready to go! Quickly the game grew to have over 15 minigames, divided into five islands. All wrapped up in a sparkly new UI and menu flow.
During this period I was able partake in the largest variety of game development components I had ever done. As a quick summary I worked on: Coding, 2d rigging and animation, UI / UX design, scene building (Art implementation), project management and game design.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
As the game grew in scope the need for clear structure became more and more apparent. Although the underlying code was well templated, each new addition required documentation and a proper list of tasks to retain consistency.
I spearheaded the use of Trello, documentation and the folder structures within our project.
Cutscenes, Audio, Dialogue, Animations, … All of these needed to have a well designed and documented implementation method.
ITERATING ON ANIMATION
We went through some iterations of how we wanted the animations in our game to work. Initially, I was responsible for rigging and animating the 2d characters, objects and environment. While the environments looked great, and we had great succes with a destructible castle golem, the main characters of the game required some complex animations like skating, surfing or climbing.
I trained our artists in using the animation program (Spine), as well as working in engine to implement more complex animations. We now work with a mix of rigged environment assets and sprite sheet (plus some puppetry) based character animation.
THE FUTURE OF FLUENCY FRIENDS
Development is still ongoing. In total we plan to release 10 Islands, about 30 minigames and a semi online mode were the community comes together to fight of Mutus set on a giant stage that you build with the power of your own voice!
