Design Intern—Floor 84 Studio

June-September 2017

        Floor 84 Studio is an independent game development studio based in Van Nuys, California that has worked on a wide range of titles from multi-platform retail releases to free-to-play mobile and online games.  While F84 has a few in-house productions that I contributed to, much of my work was for their contracted productions which are under strict NDA, meaning I can only talk about my work on these games in abstract.

        As a design intern, I had the good fortune of working directly with F84's Lead Game Designer, Sean McNamara, who taught me a lot of his personal design process, approach, and philosophy.

Contracted Productions

        I had the opportunity to work directly on games based on world-renowned properties from a variety of industry-leading companies including some of their clients featured at the bottom of their website.  For a puzzle game, I did QA testing and final difficulty balancing.  For a social media-related application based on a classic cross-media franchise, I scanned through dozens of hours of footage to create video compilations.  Additionally, I had a number of opportunities to contribute to the concept development phase for projects.  This included developing pitch documents and proposals as well as doing some concept design and writing GDDs.

        A rogue-like, 2D platformer based on an animated series was the first game I followed from the project's initiation to release.  I drew over a dozen level sketches of my own and revised them in collaboration with the project manager and lead designer.  I blocked out both my own and the lead designer's sketches in the design software, Tiled.  I was in charge of designing the environment, bug testing, level design refining, and difficulty balancing, and in later stages I was entrusted with programming tasks including some bug fixes and AI behavior scripting for which I had to learn Haxe, read through much of the pre-existing code for their in-house engine, and collaborate with the lead programmer.  After reviewing my work on the project, the lead programmer complimented me on my clear, concise, and well-documented code.

        For a 2D stealth side-scroller, I collaborated with the lead designer and a new design intern to produce the levels.  I sketched out half of the levels, blocked out my own sketches, collaborated with the rest of the design team to achieve the desired atmosphere and aesthetic, implemented the art, then did a general pass through all the levels to polish them and homogenize the aesthetic.

In-House Productions

        On the top-selling, infinite runner, Survival Run with Bear Grylls, I did thorough QA testing for a new expansion and update and worked directly with senior programmers to solve some platform specific issues.

        On the puzzle game, Tootsie Pop, I sketched out dozens of new levels for a winter-themed expansion, revised them in collaboration with the lead designer, implemented them using Tiled and Unity, and did difficulty balancing up until completion.

        On the recently announced, multiplayer mobile title, Play Cats, I did some of the early concept design for gameplay and quests.

        On a 2D narrative, side-scrolling beat 'em up, based on the comic book character, Red Sonja, I did concept design relating to art and combat, blocked out levels from the lead designer's sketches, sketched and refined a few subsequent level layouts and blocked them out, and collaborated with the lead designer to make sure the level design meshed well with the story, and the atmosphere appropriately matched the original creator's vision of the world.  On this project, I also had the opportunity to collaborate with the sound design intern to prototype a dynamic background music system.

 

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