Avitium is a turn-based RPG/card battler made in Unity for Windows.

Play as Milowit in this medieval-style experience, where you are caught between choosing to protect your Kingdom or yourself.

Collaborating with my teammates, Megan (Programmer) and Iwo (Art Director), for over 2 years, Avitium has come to be! As our Producer, Narrative Designer, and QA tester, I drafted and finalized scripts for the dialogue, created a detailed production plan, and documented bugs I observed in programming mechanics and technical art. In collaboration with our Lead Programmer, Megan, I implemented my writing in Unity using Inky for the dialogue system and narrative trick-taking mini-game.

Narrative Mini-Game

While writing the main story of Avitium, the game design team decided that to increase player engagement with the dialogue, the narrative must be game-ified. That is where we decided on a trick-taking game, which is a minuscule version of Hearts or Spades. While placing cards, if the player wins their trick, a dialogue is revealed to give the player more insight into the problems citizens are facing within the Kingdom. This allows players to see why Milowit is so adamant about finding out more, since he is mostly left in the dark by his King Kazimierz.

PRODUCTION STATEMENT

My team and I have been developing this card-battler RPG for two years in my undergraduate Game Arts program. From its barest bones and proof-of-concept demo, Solanum, we have committed ourselves to fully fleshing out and completing this project. As the Project Manager/Producer, I have utilized my skills and personal touch in many aspects of this game. I have created production plans using Scrum methodologies and executed these plans using the project management software, JIRA, and Google Sheets/Excel. I initially kept track of tasks/assigned tasks on JIRA, but moving forward from pre-production, we moved onto Sheets. Below, I created semester-long production plans, detailing tasks, milestones, and team goals.

My initial approach to my Quarter 1 production plan was to map out the timeline approach and weekly progress my team and I wished to accomplish. Evolving towards our second quarter, I decided a better approach would be to include team goals and keep a constant reminder of our overall goal for each week. It also assists with weekly meetings, where we discuss completing individual tasks while considering the scope.

As Producer, I also filled in the gaps that the other team members couldn’t. I focused more on detailed tasks like sound design (SFX), QA testing, public outreach, and feedback collection. Coincidentally, my team never truly overlapped on work, but concerns about limits and abilities to complete tasks came up as we went further into development. I checked in often, emphasizing scope above it all, and continuously pushing to ensure tasks are being done in ways where the entire team is satisfied. This team consists of artists concerned with perfection, so I had to put aside my need to be precise to honestly and confidently show up for my teammates.