Monstralia: A Healthy Life For Your Little Monster™ is a mobile educational game created by the non-profit foundation HealthStart planned for releases on PC, Android, and iOS. It follows the BLAH curriculum
From August 2019 to May 2020, I worked with a team of fellow St. Edward's students to develop minigames for one of the game's learning modules, Muscle Beach. Prior to our work, the Muscle Beach module was completely undesigned and undeveloped. During this time, my teammates and I designed, pitched, and then developed five different minigames, three of which I had a hand in the development of.
In these ten months, I worked as three distinct positions during the different phases of development. Within each role, I held a different set of responsibilities and produced different work. Thus, I've split the details of my accomplishments and the work I produced into three different sections:
Lay out the parameters of the project, what existed at that time, what was expected of me, what the module was supposed to be like.
perfect chance to talk about my ~design thinking~!!! just gotta be like, well, after assessing the situation, it seemed to me that X. So when I sat down to design my game concepts, Y. And based on A, I decided to do B, for C reason. Yes yes yes. I thought sooo hard about the design of these games. No really though, I did. I purposely chose to do a social emotional game for umm reason i dont quite remember. but i did do that. and then robin fucking loved it for that reason and chose it bc it was that type of game ok?!?! so yeah. just splurge about that.
mayhaps i have something from my pitch or design docs or anything i could throw in here? didn't I have a really neat little demonstration graphic in my powerpoint??? put that in! make it into a gif even!
first talk about the one that didnt go through and why. robin said simon says would be too complex for little kids. which i was fine with, made sense to me. be sure to come off as really mature about this OK?!?! BUT THEN, get this, she freakin LOVED my other game. the social emotional one. remember all that design thinking about that I talked about above?!? yeah it worked out great! it got chosen!!! i was so proud. from then on I became the vision keeper of that game, and then scrum master for the ohter prototype i was assigned to develop (which yes, was an idea pitched to HealthStart by a teammate)
description of what it was like scripting the game from scratch, using their systems, etc. Long description of the challenge to use their systems and how I adapted/overcame.
then some pictures/gifs/videos here, possibly(ideally) to visually tell my story, with a caption/description of each said piece of media.
throughout this whole process, the scrum methodology and stand-up meetings and agile development and using jira and alll of that was going like this. MAKE SURE TO talk specifically about my roles as both vision keeper on seashell seesaw AND as scrum master on beach bounce!!! totally different roles (in theory... shhh they dont need to know how tight knit it really was) so make em sound different and have different insights and skills gains and lessons learned.
and then yeah... that's that on that... wrap up talk about development nearing alpha. maybe put in a brief mention of how like... the team and I and our scrum process were doing at this stage. yeah, that's a good one, connect this part to the paragraph i definitely wrote just above about what scrum meetings are like! bam!
and then! we hit alpha! after like ummmmmmmmmmm six months??? was it? Once the prototypes hit the Alpha milestone, our testing phase began. I began conducting quality assurance testing on a third minigame prototype at this time while simultaneously still working as a scripter, albeit at a lesser capacity, on my prior two prototypes. The scripting I did during this time consisted almost entirely of bug fixing.
more on the bug fixing portion of the scripting here. put a SHORT(!!) lil anecdote here to make it interesting. god i wish we could see jira. maybe ill go to campus and look at it LMFAO, idk how else to write this stuff in good enough detail.
yo here da little summary of how this part of development went, what kinds of stuff i was doing.
mention testing around the bug ok and trying to get it as specific as possible before i log it. good stuff. pull out the book/dig up AS MUCH testing terminology as i POSSIBLY can. maybe even ask savannah what buzzwords i can use.
now talk about logging