Myths & Steel
A Year-long Double-Project, involving more than 50 people.
This was a pretty special project for my 1st year at rubika. During the first semester, we had to produce a full-fledged Board Game based on a revisited version of World War 2. We then had to adapt the game to PC with Unity during the last semester.
Game Pitch
In this timeline, World War 2 was not only a war of nations and ideologies. It was a conflict of Magic and Legends, awakened from their sleep by occultist warmongers after the Orgone, an impalpable energy, was discovered. In a game of Myths & Steel, two players re-enact the war as leaders of the Axies and Allies, in one of 7 unique Battles, with their sets of units, goals, and mystical beasts.
The Video Game
A Tactical War Game for 2 Players
For this adaptation of our previous work, I was the Narrative Lead, which meant I handled management for a team of 4 people.
We worked on providing the game with expositional and contextual texts, organizing the continuity of the game across all the boards, and creating and integrating the encyclopedia.
This experience taught me how to manage a production pipeline and communicate with many different clusters of people.
During this first large-scale video game project, I delved for the first time into Management and Programming in a large studio environment.
Lead Narrative Design
Team Management As a team leader, I organized the schedule and assigned tasks for my fellow narrative designers using a Kanban board on Trello. We used Google Sheets to keep track of every line of text. I also acted as a spokesperson for the narrative team during meetings with other leads.
Writing We wrote several texts for the game, including narrator speeches, flavor texts, fake historical documents, and most importantly, the encyclopedia, which gave all kinds of informations about the lore, the units and the battles' contexts.
Implementing the encyclopedia By the end of the project, we had to do a serious rescope because the programmers couldn't keep up with all the features. To save the encyclopedia from being removed, I had to delve into the game's code to implement it. This was actually a good experience !
Takeaways
Because we were going to work as a large studio of 50+ people, we had to specialize very early-on, and we couldn't really experiment or try new things since this was an adaptation. Nonetheless, I do not regret taking on a responsibility role. It taught me how to manage a team, and to work better with people.
The Original Board Game
A 2-Player Tactical Board Game
This was my very first school project. It started with an intensive week in which we had to decide most of the game's rules with everyone in the promotion. During this period, I grew a lot, both as a person and a designer.
I was a Game Designer, leading the team responsible for the Shanghai Battle map. My other main mission was designing the Event Cards available in the whole game, which were a way to link the Lore and Gameplay together.
Rulebook (in French)
Takeaways
Myths & Steel was a tough first project because we had to communicate and work with a very large number of people, and define rules, lore and boards specifics at the same time to fit the unforgiving milestones given by the school. It was sort of like a trial by fire, but for game designers. We learned a lot about team building, project management and obviously design. One particular thing I think we all learned was letting go of our ego within the team to create a healthy work environment.
Trailer with Full Credits