Early character concept art
What is GoFaceGames?
GoFaceGames is an independent studio that was founded by me and three of my friends. We all collectively enjoyed playing games and had some scattered game-making experience. We spent the first few months concepting and getting our ideas ready to share. On of the other founders and I brought these ideas to the Game Developers Conference and recruited a whole team of talented folk to make our first game, Signified, 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 Signified?
Signified is the first title to be produced by the GoFaceGames studio. A game summary for Signified can be seen below.
Aiden Dyer is led by his late wife to a mysterious estate, spurred by the possibility of uncovering details about her death. There he meets the estate's worldly denizens, who have all succumbed to Signification - their existences fragmented across the many looping timelines in the estate. Each of the Signified has their own unique abilities and decks of Signs (cards) to upgrade and add to during each time loop Aiden experiences. Will it be on this loop that he assembles a team strong enough to defeat the Miscreants defending the heart of the estate's grounds? Maybe it's the next one.
My Contributions
Lead Game Designer
During the initial concepting 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 individual team member felt heard, and help the team slowly move towards one collective vision for the game.
After the initial concepting 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 really 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 setup their own paper prototype and play around with the numbers.
Producer
I also performed many tasks typically associated with a producer as we do not have a dedicated producer on the team. My producer duties on the team included but were not limited to:
- Started and populated a shared calendar that team members could add meetings to. This allowed members of each team to join meetings from other teams if they were interested in contributing or just wanted a sneak peek into the work they were doing
- Created our team discord channels and subteam channels
- Created and updated a shared task board so that teams could see the progress other teams were making toward shared goals
- Helped create and facilitate a team leads meeting so that cross-discipline decisions could be made more effectively
- Interfaced directly with the UX team to ensure that they were neither blocked nor blocking other teams
Sneak Peek Prototype
Sneak Peek Game Build
If you are interested in playing the current build of the game, that can be done by downloading the build here: https://ethantucker.itch.io/signified-demo. The password to access the builds is "fireblob".