Here is a link to our project website: http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/blacklight-studios/

Blacklight Studios was a semester-long pre-production development team of the Entertainment Technology Center’s year long game studio project. Our mission was to lay the groundwork for a tactical RPG that brings a unique twist to the format. This includes design documents, playable prototypes of major game mechanics, concept art, and narrative details. The studio developed a pre-production package that can be used by a team in Fall 2020 to produce and publish a game. Most importantly, the goal of Blacklight Studios was to explore and experience real world hardships of the pre-production process, and receive insight into the importance of pre-production in a professional space.

As a designer on the team, I contributed toward the design of our game’s mechanics and balancing through brainstorming and iteration, working closely with Yang, the other designer on the team. I proofread and suggested changes or additions for all the design documents that Yang created while also making Test Case documents to go along with the mechanics focused design documents to help with QA testing. I also performed the bulk of our team’s QA testing, which involved maintaining a living document of identified bugs while we were working on our combat demo.

Our pre-production package did not actually get picked up and continued by a team in the Fall of 2020 because the theme of the game does not coexist well with the emergence of the Covid-19. We were far enough into the semester by the time the pandemic started and caused our team to have to work remotely, that we wanted to stay the course finishing what we started rather than trying to pivot our whole game to something that feels less distasteful. Our vision for the game is not a bad one, but the timing for such a vision likely could not have been worse.

Ol-Factory was a game I helped make in one of my elective classes during my graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University. I was a part of a team of four that did not really have specific roles, but my contribution involved programming and design tasks. In its current state, Ol-Factory first introduces the player to the ten different types of smells and then tasks the player with creating specific scents, based off of a description, by combining two of the basic smells through intuition and a bit of trial and error. Get enough of them correct and the player will have passed their technical interview and get hired, effectively winning the game. I specifically programmed the smell combination button console system and the structure of the technical interview part of the game.

This project started from the notion of what visualizing smells would look like. The particle systems associated with each of the ten smell types remained the same, outside of some refinement, since the beginning, but originally the game allowed the player to combine smells at their leisure to see what would result. It was more of a toy or experience than a game, but halfway through development it was suggested to flip the script and turn it into a guessing game. We went through a handful of iterations, making many user interface and experience improvements each time, and got to the current version of the game which can be downloaded and played here: https://eangrady.itch.io/ol-factory