Purrfect Employee

Marketing

Thoughts we had about Promoting and Marketing our game:

From the very beginning we knew we wanted people to enjoy our game in person, and because it was a virtual reality game we knew we needed to curate a space to make people feel welcome and included even when they weren't playing our game. We divided our physical space into a few parts: Gameplay, Posters, Interactables, Volunteer works, and lastly had a development slideshow on display.

Posters

Below are a series of Posters that my team and I rendered to help promote our game for our schools end of the year festival CHROMA. After we printed them, we hung them up all around campus to create buzz around our game.

My thumbnail (Top left)

Vivian's Final Draft

Abbie and Vivian hanging up our Poster

Abbies drawn poster

Volunteer Work

We had a lot of volunteers join us on our project

Vivian and I worked together to curate a few things to attract volunteers, the first thing we did was hang up massive posters all around our campus (as referred to above). After that, we put up specialized posters with a QR code that a person could scan. After that, the code would transport scanners to a Google forms page where they could learn about the project.

You can find the posters that would lead you to the google form below.

For us, we always wanted our project to be more than just a capstone between Vivian and I. We wanted this project to be an opportunity to connect as many people at our school with our project as possible. In the end we had staff, students and submissions of all types and from all walks of life for Purrfect Employee.

A Purrfect employee drawn by Micah Smith (volunteer)

Recruitment poster #1

Made by Vivian

Recruitment poster #2

Made by Vivian

Recruitment poster #3

Made by Vivian

After Volunteers scanned the QR code, they would be directed to a google forms page to learn more about the project and how they could participate.

On the google forms page, participants would read up on the project and what we were asking for.

We were looking for 2D artwork as well as volunteers to voice act for our game.

We wrote in a short contract at the end of the form to insure that all artists owned their artwork and we were using their artwork for the purpose of cross community participation as well as adding features to our game.

Volunteer Stickers

Volunteer Posters

Website

We created a website to give players a place to learn about our project

The website you see here is our teams first iteration of The Purrfect Employee website. You could use the page to learn about the project, as well at the core development team that made the game. Visitors are also able to contact any member directly about their contributions to the project.

We have an updated page here:

https://purrfectemployee.com/

3D Printing

Besides having gameplay streamed for the Chroma's event, we also wanted to bring people inside the office before they played.

This was done by having them able to interacted with a 3D printed version of the gameplay space.

We 3D printed some swag that attendees could also take home with them and put on keychains.

Chroma Display

We also wanted to make the CHROMA event fun for us as teammates.

Because we were making a game about a cat working an office job, I thought it would be fun to have all of the members of the team wear uniforms and ties to play up the event.

We were hosting an office party, and the party was going to be about our game.

Dialog Writing

I was in charge of writing all of the dialog for our Game

How the dialog works

This was the first time I had ever written dialog, let alone videogame dialog. but I had the vision of what I wanted. I wanted to give players choices and pathways during gameplay. But there was a bit of a learning curb. I started out very ambitious giving players 4 options (Meow, Hiss, Purr, …) instead of the 3 I decided to keep (Meow, Hiss, … )

A Close up of how Stuff breaks down

As you can see, at this point I bit off a bit more than I could chew.

I wanted to provide options to players, but I quickly learned that creating dialog can turn into an exponential amount of work if you don't keep in mind scope. I suddenly realized why AAA companies ended up switching to simple dialog systems.

Changes had to be made, So I tried something new

I worked out some of my prior frustrations with the exponential dialog by working with a professor and decided to cut two of the options to see if I could write a successful piece of dialog that didn't forever expand. What I created was "Russians woman dialog"

This dialog was different in that, I limited player options, but I also allowed deviations up and down the options I gave players. I used a line to separate the choices into positive (above the line) and negative (below the line). Depending on how the players navigated the dialog they would either get positive outcomes or negative outcomes from a given choice.

Another inclusion in this dialog was the addition of Identifiers (A1, B1, B2, C1, etc.) these were going to be important for recording, editing and for organizing the dialogs into digestible forms with my programmer later.

After that success, I ended up leveling up each dialog to make them a little bit more complicated than the last one.

In the end, I wrote 10 original Dialogs for the game in a quarter of a semester. But this wasn't the end, after finishing the dialogs, I needed to find actors to record them.

I couldn't have done it without the help of so many talented voice actors

All of the actors came to us on a volunteer basis (you can find out more about the process under the marketing tab) We tested out the studio, and had a great time >:)

Vera Lee - Middle Aged Russian Woman

Thomas Jones (me) - Boss, Irishman, Tutorial introduction

Abbie (left) - Nervous Highschool girl

Vivian (right) - Meowing, and Hissing

Belligerent Caller voiced by Kyle Latino:

Extended Warrenty voiced by Zach Cobb:

The Irishman voiced by Thomas Jones (Me)

The Rocky Railroad Podcast

One of the most important things for me to include in this game was working with a student at CCAD named rocky. He's the coolest nerd that I know, and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of all things relating to trains. After graduating, I wasn't sure if I'd ever see him again, and I wanted to immortalize spending time with the guy by recording a podcast with him and my friend Gia (who would play the straight man on the podcast)

Some snippets of audio you can find inside our game.

Production

I was the Team Lead and Lead Producer of this Project

This means I created achievable goals on a sometimes weekly and sometimes bi-weekly base for the team, I led team meetings and guided our design principles and philosophy. I secured funding for our project and planned out how we would present our game to the public. I also made sure to catalog everything we did for production.

Summary of Production

Purrfect employee was the largest project I’ve planned and worked on to date. It took many months of learning and development to reach the place it ended up by the end of the school year. And it will continue to take months of learning and planning to launch it commercially.

Our Game Development was broken up into Two main Chunks:

1) Research + Planning + Development

2) Volunteers + bringing our skills together + Delivering our final product

Early Phases

A lot of the best idea’s start naturally, and that's exactly how Purrfect Employee began. It is a silly concept that me and some friends had over dinner and drinks.

I had just finished creating my first videogame a month or so before. The idea of a cat working an office job immediately sounded funny to me so I wrote the idea down.

Building the Team

I had already made a splash with my last game, and I had a few people from my college who were ready and willing to be a part of a new project. Standout amongst them was a friend I made in 3D modeling class named Vivian who would end up Co-leading the project with me. She and I were both seniors and decided to make this project our capstone together.

Besides her, I got permission from my school to include a programmer from another college, as well as a programmer from my own college that I met through a friend of a friend. I also had a previous teammate who wanted to work with me because of our previous work together.

After building this team we had enough people to get the ball rolling on Purrfect Employee. The next set of phases started after that.

Research and Planning

Many of our teammates did not know how to make a videogame from scratch, and we needed to learn how to model, texture, write dialog, create dialog trees and work with VR technology in the unity game engine. We spent the first few months learning and practicing these new skills. Unity, Blender, Management Techniques and pipeline communication.

Blender

We decided to make our videogame assets with a software called Blender. This was to insure that we had full ownership over the items we created.

Many members of the team had become accustomed to using to using a program called Maya, but I made the executive decision to have our team use Blender because of its open source licensing and the massive amount of tutorials and community help that exists for that software. There was also the added bonus we'd be able to use blender post graduation without paying a monthly fee.

Our team learned the software especially during September - October, and continued to build upon our skills during the following months.

Finances

I wanted to make a virtual reality game with my team, but I was the only member with a VR headset. I wanted to find out if there was anything my school could provide me with to get VR headsets for my teammates.

Over the summer, I met with my schools financial aid office and I talked with a bursar at length about my project ambitions and asked if the school had any ability to help me achieve our goals.

We met a few times over the summer to talk about a few different things including developing this videogame. These meetings would ended up paying off.

A few months later I was awarded additional scholarship money to do with as I wanted. I immediatly decided I would use the money to support the development of Purrfect Employee

Hardware

After getting a additional scholarship money, I bought some VR headsets for the two programmers working with me on Purrfect Employee as well as one for myself. Together we used the Headsets and the built in software found inside the unity game engine called Plastic SCM, to make changes to our game and protect it with cloud storage.

Without buying the headsets, Purrfect Employee would not have succeeded.

Grey Box

We had our first grey box made in early autumn. Carri (our programmer) put the the office together with some assets that came in a free package our school provided, and Vivian sent me some of her first assets to add into the game world as well. I added in some of the assets I had created too. At this point in the project Carri and I were the only people able to access the unity file so it was our responsibly to curate the space.

By the end of Autumn we had our first minigame created which was organizing paper into folders. We also had two more students become interested in the project, and they both joined our team.

Obstacles

There were a few obstacles that our team experienced during the earliest months of development, and a lot of them can be chalked up to inexperience developing a game from start to finish as well as the challenge of learning a new software from nothing.

But as a producer, I realized their was a much larger obstacle facing our team: Decentralized Communication

Our team members had different schedules and obligations outside of developing Purrfect Employee, as a Team Lead I needed to play telephone with the entire development team on what we were moving forward on as well as what everyone should be doing.

We had a discord server for easy communication, but it was significantly difficult to come together and attack the development of the game while at the same time keeping up motivation and group cohesion while decentralized.

Another Problem: there was a member on our team who was not putting in the effort and work that they promised.

They also did a poor job of communicating road bumps or asking for help with any other team member. I had worked with this team member in the past and I knew they could perform well, which made the issue all the more difficult to untangle.

Successes

Our team had a lot of successes during our first semester getting our footing right.

In a lot of ways I believe you learn more about how to succeed by learning how to fail. Learning Blender had its ups and it had its downs. I for one really struggled to learn how to UV in the program and I struggled to learn how to texture.

But in later months I found new ways of attacking these problems and solving them. I also learned how to avoid exponential creep in the dialog systems. We also had our first voice actor added into the game by the end of the semester.

During Autumn development we always knew it would be a difficult time adapting to a new program. But even so, we still delivered on a fantastic Greybox and we learned exactly what we needed to do to better during spring semester.

Presentations

Level Design

Early Phases

In the early Phases of our game we imagined our game would take place in the 1990's.

The office would be drab and dreadful to be inside. We imagined that players would be trapped to their desks and would not be given freedom of movement besides the wingspan of their arms and the rotation of their necks. These ideas would change over time.

Room exploration vs Stationary gameplay

At first, we thought we wanted out players to be stuck inside their cubical during the entirety of gameplay. All minigames would be reachable to players by their natural wingspans, and no players would be forced to strain for anything.

We believed this would make it easier on players to become used to the VR space (for those who never played VR) But what we discovered, is that stationary Virtual reality is BORING.

Why create an immersive sim that breaks the rule of freedom and exploration, that isn't what games should do, games provide freedom innately to players of most games.

We opened up gameplay to the entire office

Once we opened up movement outside of the cubical we had a lot of fun decorating the rest of the cubical to make the office feel lived in (but also goofy)

Slide show

Purrfect Employee

Purrfect Employee™ is a virtual reality game developed myself and my team while attending the Columbus College of Art and Design.

During gameplay, you play as a cat working a desk job where you perform a series of minigames like: answering phone calls, organize files, replying to emails or you can knock over and break everything in the office. The game was built in the Unity game engine and is currently being developed to release in January 2024.

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