BRAND
Project
Summary
Made With
TELLING GHOST STORIES AT
CAMP SPOOKY
I led concept, creation, and development of a commercial cross-platform gaming project for IDSI to expand into a new market.
Eric Monachello
Cassandra Trissler
Rachael Spayde
Henry Meredith
Daniel Wilson
Duncan Iaria
Zach Helm
Chris Hassebrook
Duncan Yewell
Nick Paparazzo
Lacey MacDuffie
Background
Project background
Spirits of the Lost is a choose-your-own-adventure game developed as a commercial venture at IDSI. In 2016, after the success of the 'Reserve Life' project, IDSI leadership wanted to expand the companies growing interactive gaming capability and to prove the viabilty of games for learning. Developed as a commercial demonstrative capability over 5 months, it concluded with successful user tests with focus groups and was used to secure funding for the Garrison Fox project.
storyboarding
Crafting the story
I started by whiteboarding and brainstorming with the team to outline the overall story. We outlined a campfire tale with a "Goonies" theme while weaving learning themes throughout the narrative gameplay.
I worked with the development team to use our 'Reserve Life' framework, with some improvements. We wanted players to control their characters and interact with objects, expanding the narrative into an adventure game.
I had a small team of instructional designers that showed interest in joining the project, so I paired them with artists and game designers to help build the story.
Bringing it all to life
Working as creative lead for the project, I worked with artists to outline what the look and feel should be. Working off our moodboards, I wanted the style to be whimsical with inspiration from games like Night in the Woods and Broken Age. I had extremely talented artists and animators on the team that took this concept and ran with it, building the vast world of Camp Spooky.
As artists worked through designs, I worked to expand their concepts, explore new ideas, and polish designs. Developers recommend using vector graphics directly in the game engine to improve performance, which allowed for a large amount of detail in the environments.
Design
Expanding the design
During development I managed communication and expectations between story, design, and development to make sure the product matched the vision. I translated needs between story and design, helped brainstorm workarounds with development, and mitigated conflicts that came up.
Working with the design team, we decided to reuse a lot of the same animation components from Reserve Life but work with development to allow the user to control characters. The design team built character sheets and animatics for every character, which meant we needed to keep the cast small.
Development
Testing where it matters
Throughout development we had several focus sessions at The Boys and Girls Club of Yorktown and Gloucester to test art style, characters, features, game play, game flow, and the story. Initial tests showed we needed to provide more opportunities for users to engage and I iteratively worked with the story team throughout the rest of the project to find areas to improve. As story was updated, I worked with design and development to translate changes and user needs. In our last user test, the product was extremely well recieved with only minor changes.
The future looks bright
Throughout 2016 and 2017, IDSI leadership used Spirits of the Lost to demo to potential customers, showcasing the company's 'games for learning' capability. During IITSEC 2017 the success of the product was used to secure funding for the Garrison Fox project.
Spirits of the Lost is still used as a capabilities demo for our team, with discussions to publish to itch.io or steam.