Molementum is a 3D party action game where you assume the role of a mole criminal to rob mines of their precious gems. Grab up to 3 friends and scramble your way through mines while engaging in various acts of competitive mischief as you try to become the most notorious mole criminal.
I joined Molementum halfway through development & worked on it for 1 semester alongside 17 other developers. We created it in Unity.
When the Plushie Bomb team onboarded me, they had several narrative designers but no way to tell a story. I quickly designed & pitched a system whereby every round of action would take place in a 'storybeat' that determined the narrative text, map, available upgrades, and objectives. Which objectives the team collectively completed would determine which storybeat they moved into next. We quickly determined that this system was out of scope and too mechanically complex for our target genre. I cut the number of objectives to 1, simplified the scoring system, and loosened the linear connection between storybeats.
Due to Plushie Bomb's abundance of designers, I mostly served as a programmer from then on. I implemented various objectives, upgrades, UI elements, and bugfixes. I also helped extensively QA the game for balance and bugs.
Plushie Bomb Studios made excellent use of agile workflows & decentralized leadership structures which allowed it to successfully pull off multiple major & necessary course corrections. The team's excellent performance reinforced my appreciation of the need to involve everyone's voices and to maintain strong & clear communication between disciplines.
On the other hand, the last few weeks of the project resulted in serious crunch (especially for the programmers). This was largely due to unexpected external factors taking some of our teammates out of action, but we could have taken steps to mitigate this. Specifically, we should have been far more willing to cut pieces of content that we did not finish by their appointed deadlines (such as Alpha and Beta) rather than trying to fix their numerous issues all the way up to the wire. We all miss the Hackathon objective, and I think Molementum would have been better with it-- but no content or mechanic is worth jeopardizing the entire project. I will be much more cautious about sunk cost & unsubstantiated assurances in future promises.
