Shrouded Depths
Role: Quality Assurance Lead
Description
Shrouded Depths is a single player survival horror game that takes place in the hull of a ship. As the player explores the ship they quickly realize that things are not as they seem and something very old and eldritch has infested the ship, morphing it around them in attempt to trap them forever.
As you continue through the game you will discover the story of a previous expedition into the swamp and the aftermath of their encounter with the monster on the ship.
This project was made over the course of a year and involved me as the quality assurance lead and eventual pivotal designer for it’s pacing and game feel.
Links to project below
What I learned
This project was one that taught me quite a few lessons on management and when to take action to save a project. I started as the sole quality assurance developer on the project but by the end I ended up with a small but effective team of QA developers and programmers to help with both resolving bug tickets and identifying and creating stable milestone builds.
One of the first things I learned on this project was how to work with and lead a team of programmers and designers from a role that isn’t always in control of scope and project timeline. A key example of this was during the first few months of the project when we were working on initial version of the monster. Despite it’s incredibly buggy state we still had to record and report all bugs we found. during this time I took care of a majority of the reporting and relied on my programmer to continue development cheats on the meantime. To help manage the time better I found times we could go over key parts of the needed cheats and how crucial they were for effective reporting. Despite many issues throughout the project nearly every team member found our developer cheats useful and relevant to the needs of the game which I took a win for both me and the programmer under my lead.
Development Images
Another Issue, one that was imperative to the success of the project, involved a major shift in level design that came as a response from the QA team’s feedback and a late milestone. It was nearly halfway through development and the game was not in great shape with our original idea of a single level horror experience not panning out with the previous swamp setting. Late one night we had an executive leads meeting to figure out how to fix the project in time for release. Despite my reservations and my commitment to the position of QA lead, I went out on a limb and proposed the plan that would save our project. My idea was to pivot our project from a single level to one constantly evolving area type, specifically the tight and claustrophobic halls.
After this idea was proposed I was constantly asked and involved into the design process, both as the QA lead but also as a partial designer. Despite my involvement with it, the sudden change did teach me quite a good amount on how to pivot a project and how to effectively utilize pre-existing resources to complete projects on time.
