Plunder! An edugame by Full Sail University

Plunder! was a project by the Serious Games Club at Full Sail, which I was a part of. It was aimed at high school and college age students in order to strengthen their grammar skills.

I worked on both the writing team and the research team for the project while I was in school. Creating characters for use as NPCs was my role on the writing team. For the research team I worked on documentation for grants for the production of the game.

I was still involved with Plunder! even after graduation, researching best practices for the creation of edugames as an intern for the University. You can learn more aboutPlunder! at this website: Plunder Website.

Erik the Great, a Team Faceroll production

Erik was our team’s final project at Full Sail. It was supposed to be a fully playable demo version of a game designed and created in three months as our last test before graduation. We were the first class through this particular version of the program and we set the bar high.

With a team of five students, we overlapped many roles in the design process, but my primary goal was the overall theme and cohesion of the game, as well as the narrative design. We were limited in scope at the beginning, and even more so by the time we reached gold release, so story was one of the things that fell to the side. We also didn’t have an artist or a 3d modeler on our team, so the game is very rough and the dialogue and cutscenes become even more critical.

I worked with the people developing in unrealscript and kismet to get the dialogue as responsive as we could and I took initiative in organizing the loops required for kismet-based dialogue to work effectively.

If you’d like to view the video of the postmortem of our project, it’s on youtube at this link: Erik the Great Final Presentation.