Early character concept art
What is GoFaceGames?
GoFaceGames is an independent studio that I cofounded with friends and peers. We all sought real game industry experience and wanted to put our game development experience to good use. We spent the first few months concepting and getting our ideas ready to share. We brought our idea to the Game Developers Conference and recruited a team of talented folk to make our first game, Rite of the Dealer, come to life. Our studio is now ~15 people and growing. We have dedicated art, narrative, mechanics, UX, and programming teams. If you are interested in our playable demo, there are mac and windows build links at the bottom of this page!
What is 'Rite of the Dealer'?
Rite of the Dealer is the first title to be produced by the GoFaceGames. Rite of the Dealer is an ethereal roguelike featuring a unique “multi-deckbuilding” system and evolvable creature companions. Below is a brief video of current gameplay!
My Contributions
Lead Game Designer
During the initial conception of the game, I lead the brainstorming sessions. I helped our team generate ideas iteratively and then slowly hone in on the ideas that we collectively liked the most. As a team with a variety of gaming backgrounds, our ideas spanned multiple genres and many were completely out of left field. It was my job to field these ideas, make sure that each team member felt heard, and help the team slowly move towards one collective vision for the game.
After the initial ideation, I moved into a lead design role. My main aim within the role was to develop systems to support our overarching game idea. This shift caused another smaller round of brainstorming. The design team and I researched other similar games and genres to better understand how other teams had solved similar problems. With these successful systems and our concept in mind, we were able to iteratively create systems to support our game’s vision.
My main responsibility became: ensuring that the needs of the design team were being taken care of by the software team and evangelizing the design decisions that had been made to the rest of the team. As the technical work on the game began I was often in meetings with the programmers to ensure that the needs of the designers were being taken into account. We are constantly making steps to make it easier for our designers to work in engine and iterate on our designs.
When the design itself was "frozen" so that other teams could move forward quickly without fear of large changes, I shifted gears into documentation and evangelization. A decision that is made but not effectively documented may well have been not made at all. We quickly learned how difficult it was to onboard new team members and get everyone on board with one collective vision. Through all of that, we have learned how to better document and what types of documentation work in which situations. We now have a lo-fi figma prototype that people can play through entirely to understand the gameplay loop (this can be seen below), a "Guide to Signified" that goes into the mechanics and the reasoning behind them, and a playtesting setup doc so that anyone on the team can set up their own paper prototype and play around with the numbers.
Gameplay Programmer
After completing most of the game design work, I shifted focus to implementation. GFG is an indie studio, and I wear many hats on the team. I have been mainly focused on technical UI implementation. This includes (but is not limited to):
- the entirety of the main combat scene
- card & companion compendiums
- all in-game menus
- post combat win & loss screen as well as end of run win & loss screens
- card text replacement (ensuring cards always reflect current in-game state & display the correct values)
Sneak Peek Figma Prototype
This is the initial Figma prototype that was used to get buy in from other team members and ensure that we had a shared understanding of the game we were building. If you step through the prototype and the alpha build of the game, you will see how true we stayed to our initial vision! You will also see the amazing strides we made in improving the UX design to make the system easier to understand for new players.
Early Vertical Slice Game Build
If you are interested in playing the current build of the game, that can be done by downloading the build here: https://gofacegames.itch.io/signified. The password to access the builds is "bidoof4ever".