Awakening 7: The Golden Age
Project Description
Awakening 7 was made during the tail-end of the single-player, offline adventure genre under a try-before-you-buy business model. At around this time, the business model was shifting towards free-to-play. Despite the decline of "traditional" these Hidden Object Adventure Games (HOPAs), Boomzap invested in video improvements, which were applied to Awakening, giving it a more cinematic treatment than previous projects.
The project's production was the largest I'd handled for any game during my time in Boomzap. Each major character — a ranger, a little girl, several minotaurs, and even a dragon — had an individual 3D model, and the cinematics were no longer confined to painted landscape backgrounds, a stark contrast to previous projects, in which cinematics were strictly in between at least 30 minutes of gameplay, with no 3D assets at all. There were also more voice over assets for Awakening 7 and more cutscenes / interstitials, spaced every few puzzles apart.
While I rarely made requests to the programmers on game engine improvements, I did request a specific feature for Awakening 7: the use of interpolations (linear, cubic, bounce, elastic, etc) in the video editor. Up until that point, interpolations were done manually. This small quality-of-life improvement powered up even the most junior of artist-animators who would have otherwise spent a few hours tweaking keyframes in order to create a realistic animation.
Awakening 7 launched in November 2014. By then, mobile and free-to-play were the dominant platform and business model. Resources were moved to those departments. I was assigned to design games for mobile, beginning with Monster Roller.
My Role and Responsibilities
| My role | Designer / Team Lead |
|---|---|
| Core team size | 10-15 |
| Responsibilities | Design & Writing, Project Management, Production |
| Documentation produced | Pitch, Game Design Document, Tasklist, Prototypes, Feature Request Documents, Publisher Communication, Player Feedback Reports, Bug Reports (JIRA) |
| My tools | Photoshop, Excel (as game data exporter), Google Docs (pitch, feedback, and GDD), Google Sheets (task sheet, walkthrough), Basecamp, as well as proprietary company tools for level, video and UI elements |
| Credits | Mobygames |
My time in Awakening 7 was split between high level, project management duties and narrative design, making sure that the game's story made sense and that everyone on the team was on the same page. While in previous projects the team worked linearly, Awakening 7's team was split between me and a fellow designer (my trainee) working on different parts of the game, so it was important to occasionally check that we hadn't accidentally mixed up our puzzles or story beats. Apart from that, my tasks in writing, designing, and directing my half of the game remained the same as in my previous project.
Project Specs
| Project | Awakening 7: The Golden Age |
|---|---|
| My role | Designer / Team Lead |
| Developer | Boomzap |
| Publisher | Big Fish Games |
| Genre | Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure (HOPA) |
| Release Date | Nov 1, 2014 |
| Online stores | BFG - Steam |
| Platforms | PC, Mac, Android†, iOS† |
| Localization | German, French, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese |
| Let's play* | YourGibs on YT |
†Android and iOS builds are no longer available from BFG's Play / App Stores.
*Let's play videos are playthroughs by players / fans. Neither the developer (Boomzap, my employer at the time) nor the publisher have any affiliation with these streamers / youtubers.
Production Gallery — Experiments and Concepts
Previous portfolio pages explored what bugs might pop up in this genre. For EC7, where the focus relied heavily on big, attention-grabbing moments, we did more pre-production and planning to lessen revison times.