Installation Wizard
Completed: Release in summer 2024
Genre: Visual Novel
Platform(s): PC/Mac
Description: A visual novel about a young man named Albarn, the child of immigrants, and his journey to connect with his newly discovered family in the old country while his mother falls ill with a deadly disease.
Unusual elements:
- Intergenerational communication made gamified
- Oregon Trail meets a zoom call with your grandma
My roles:
- Lead Developer
As the lead developer of Installation Wizard, my main goals have been to make sure all code in the game is functional, bug-free, and organized while also helping the younger and less experienced engineers on the team become much more skilled than they were when the project started.
My main method for managing the team was to institute a pull request system, so all code entering the project had to be approved by me (and that my code had to be approved by either the creative director or another engineer), and that if code wasn't meeting style guides, was inefficient, or was prone to bugs, that helpful feedback could be given. This system worked very well, and led to the team having zero major bugs or other engineering-related disasters throughout the entire run of the project.
Since I had done similar tasks for BROKE: The Game and The Old Manchester Place, one of the first tasks I made for myself was to make a very robust dialogue system that would make it easy to edit and implement the game's very nonlinear narrative, even for writers who may not know how to write or read code. I created a scriptable object system (see left) that would contain all text to be shown in game, how that text fits into the story, and what kinds of effects may need to happen outside of the display of dialogue itself.
I also created an addressables system which made sure that certain assets that would be needed in many scenes and contexts, such as sound files, structure-related data, and character portraits, could be easily accessed in code anywhere in the game.