Sea of Shanties is a 2D student-made rhythm-action game in which you assemble a crew of pirate musicians to embark on a voyage through treacherous waters and perform sea songs in battle with fearsome monsters.

Sea of Shanties innovates on the rhythm game genre by introducing RPG elements such as a party of characters, special abilities, and customized enemies.

Through concepting and prototyping my co-creator and I were able to reasonably scope and execute this complex vision within our short development cycle.

We incorporated player feedback as early as possible in the development process by conducting RITE playtesting in each sprint. We made use of playtesting facilities to record players gameplay, observe their body language, and record their vocalized thoughts and opinions while playing. This footage was supplemented by post-playtest interview questions as well as exportable user metrics within the builds to best understand the successes and failures of our iterations. We synthesized our findings into succinct slides presented to our peers.

detailed documentation

Complex audio systems were integrated with Wwise.

To manage this fast-paced, 2-person production, organization was key. We used a 2-week sprint system well-documented with burndown charts. Biweekly task delegation was further tracked through priority markers, time estimates, and progress trackers.