KAELAN sIMPSON

What Went Right:

Map editor tool

The map editor I created was very effective at speeding up our content pipeline.  I accounted for some of the mistakes I had made on my Alberio editor  which lead to a very effective level design tool.  Every map in the final version of Akasha was created and edited with the map editor I created.

Development of combat mechanics

Developing a pure strategy game from scratch was a system design challenge.  Our team went through tons of rapid iteration playtests before finally landing on our core combat mechanics.  The combat mechanics lead to a good pure strategy combat system that i was able to math out in spread sheets.  I was able to analyze the system and improve it by running some expected value calculations.
 

What Went Wrong:

Telemetric system

I designed a telemetric system to track bulk amounts of playtest data.  While the collection and organization of the playtest data was successful, I never got the visualizations of this data to be automated.  I originally wanted collected data to automatically feed into D3 visualizations.  Unfortunately this was too out of scope for the time frame I had leaving only manual visualizations to be created with the raw data files. 

What I Gained:

Experience designing pure strategy game from scratch

My biggest gain from Akasha was being able to develop a digital pure strategy game from scratch.  Having to develop and playtest original pure strategy mechanics massively increase by cabibilites as a system designer.  While I had made small scale pure strategy systems in the past, they all relied on hidden information.  Akasha was a unique challenge because it possessed no hidden information.

Experience with data collection and visualization

While my data collection and visualization plan never fully came into being, I still learned a lot about the subject.  I learned how to effectively collect mass data and organize it into something useful.  I experience first hand what makes good data as well as practical technical knowledge on how to collect it.