Lobber started during Fitchburg State University's Spring 2023 Game Studio Capstone program as a student-run project. It was one pitch of many and since it's inception I was very enthusiastic to volunteer to direct and design for this project. The initial pitch was essentially a 3rd person action game where the main mechanic involved chopping off enemies' heads with an axe and then chucking them at other enemies. From the get-go I knew this mechanic would make for an excellent player feedback loop.

Early development involved a lot of careful planning and time budgeting to ensure we didn't over-scope. We had a small team and a lot to do, even if our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) wasn't super ambitious. Our early goals were to get a simple combat system going where the player could whack enemies and run around a 3D arena. We achieved this quickly and looked to flesh out the experience a bit, leaving time near the end of our initial 4 month dev period for polish. I worked closely with each member of my team in the studio during this time, acting as a producer and making sure team decisions were communicated well.

As lead designer, my approach to design for the mechanics of Lobber was to prototype more, assume less, and iterate heavily on player feedback. A lot of my work during early development was spent writing up and prototyping mechanics myself that I thought would improve and reinforce the game's central gameplay loop. I would then organize playtests and use feedback to inform my decisions about what mechanics were working or which ones needed more work.

A major mechanic that I designed and prototyped was the 'headpopping' mechanic. Since enemies in the game would always seek out the player, we realized that players had little incentive to actually move around the level. To solve this problem, I tried having the skull and health pickups in the game pop out of slain enemies and fly across the map a short distance instead of just dropping at enemies' feet. I also added a bonus to that pickup's resource type if players could catch it before it hit the ground. This created an engaging positioning minigame going on during combat, and encouraged players to move around the level more. It also made for a much cooler spectacle when killing hordes of enemies and seeing pickups flying every which way.

After tons of weekly standups, milestone lists, and meeting notes, we had our first major public playtest at Made In MA Boston 2023. Here, we received lots of positive feedback about the gameplay and visuals. Based on feedback, the team made a major decision afterwards: we decided the game was going well enough that we wanted to carry out a full release on Steam!

It was here that I had to pivot from design to polish mode. During this time I did a ton of implementation for various aspects of the game, including particle effects, sound, haptics, code, and more. It took a few more months to get the game up to a standard that myself and the team were happy with, but we managed to publish Lobber on Steam in September, 2023. The game has only been out for a few months but it's been receiving positive reviews and is succeeding in delivering on the experience I directed and designed the game to have. Very happy with how it turned out!