Zoom Zoom Newton

Role : Producer / Sound Designer

Status: Beta

About

Zoom Zoom Newton is a mobile game where you play as a cat (Newton) on an interstellar pinball-style adventure! Tap to create gravity wells and navigate Newton through hyperspace to find his way home. Coming soon to Google Play this 2019.

Created in Unity

Project Timeline

8 sprints (4 months)

My Contribution

• Set up team JIRA

• Helped Manage JIRA

• Kept team on track/scoping well throughout process

• Held one on ones with teammates

• Created written materials – tutorial scripts, roadmaps, etc.

• Pitched game to classmates, instructors, and industry folks at GDC

• Playtested to evaluate efficiency of mechanics

• Mixed and edited background music

• Mixed and edited audio effects

• Created specialized audio for trailer

• Founded Boxcastle LLC as a government recognized company

• Created business plan for potential future monetization

• Hosted/organized team bonding events throughout semester

Project Reflection

Overall I approached my contributions in this project with energy and dedication. I completed my tasks to the fullest of my ability and helped ensure our team environment was pleasant to work in while doing it – which felt like a success to me!

One goal I had for the semester was to compose an original score for the game, and I spent many weeks working with FL Studio and taking an online game music composition class on top of school and work. However, composing from scratch is quite difficult (as I found out through this process) and I was unable to complete the pieces in time and ended up mixing our music from Garageband for the game. It still turned out well, and I’m happy with it, but next time I would scope my own schedule a bit more realistically.

I learned a lot of new Agile methodology tricks this semester (emotion trackers, slackbots that collect stand – up information at the end of work sessions, etc.) which I want to incorporate into my next project. Also, after looking at data from JIRA, I saw that our team’s velocity had a few bubbles of slowdown over the course of the semester.  To counter this I want to facilitate weekly deliverables and check-ins for all parts of the team, which I’m going to push as a team norm for my thesis team.

Postmortem

Our team process was solid. Overall everyone got the work done that they needed to do and caught up quickly if confronted with unfinished tasks. We took input internally and from playtesters to make our main mechanic as fun as it could be, then iterated with level types to see what worked best. I think having an art lead will help keep velocity up in the future, and help us make more concrete decisions about art direction. For a small mobile game, our process worked pretty well. Everyone was usually on the same page at any given moment. We had excellent cohesion, lots of fun team bonding events, and our stress levels regarding the project were low overall.

When meeting with simulated EPs, our team was confident in our abilities and design direction – we interacted professionally, but playfully. We knew which information could be really helpful for us, and which was fluff that we didn’t need to take seriously.

screenshots