Synergy
City-Builder | PC | Unity | Professional Project | 2 years | 2023-2025
Each plants has health conditions that leads to their death or producing more resources, and impacts on the environment that affects other plants, citizens or the soil. The plant featured here has a specific growth pattern I had to code using tools made by the team.
The map tool was directly in the game and hidden from players in public releases.
Pitch
Synergy is a city builder with an emphasis on the environement, the player must be careful of the flora by harvesting plants instead of destroying them to gather resources. The plant system is quite robust, each specimen has an impact on the area around them, they have specific needs to grow and produce resources, and there is multiple ways to harvest them to obtain different results.
Expeditions can be sent to others areas, a tech tree allows to gain new buildings and events will force the player to satisfy the needs of the population as the city grows.
My work
QA
- Bug report
- Task verification
- Gameplay Feedbacks
- Helping players on social media platforms
Game Design-
- Intergration in-engine
- Writing gameplay descriptions
- Balancing
- Level Design fixes
Project Description
After the end of my internship at Enginn Technologies, I was hired at Leikir as an apprentice in QA. I was going to the studio each afternoon after my morning classes to work on the game almost exclusively. I was the only internal QA at Leikir, at different times QA from the publisher was provided or an external QA company was involved, but most of the time I was alone.
My first year at the studio was only as a QA, the game wasn't released yet and the environment to bug report was scattered on different platforms. I decided to reunite every bugs on a Google Sheet designed to be easily read by the team as a temporary solution until a Mantis was setup. Once everything was in place, other tasks were assigned to me like validating the tasks of designers and programmers, or writing gameplay feedbacks at the demand of designers once a new feature was complete or a big update was coming.
Once the game released in early access in Spring 2024, I now had to interact with the players on Discord and Steam forums to gather new bugs and , on top of my usual tasks.
In my second year I started work on game design tasks. The first task was the implementation of all the new plants appearing in 1.0 and rework the old ones to fit the new system, which included rewriting all gameplay descriptions for plants. These descriptions needed to be clearer and convey the mechanics to the players, contrary to the narration descriptions which are here for immersion.
In the last months of the development, the team was progressively dispatched to another project. I was the last member to work on the project, working on stress testing the optimization of the game and fixing bugs that were within my skills (fixing plants, texts, level design...)
After that I worked for a month on a project that never came out, designing new abilities for a top-down action/city-builder hybrid.
The Team
- 6 Game Artists
- 6 Game Programmers
- 4 Game Designers
- 1 Producer
- 4 Sound Designers/Artists
