Feather Weight is a 2.5D (as opposed to 3D) chicken-collecting action game that is designed for streamer-viewer competition through Twitch.tv!

Featherweight uses natural language processing to bring twitch streamers and their viewers together. Twitch chatters can aid the streamer or hinder them by entering their intention in chat.

This was a game that evolved dramatically during its development. Working on this game in 2016 was a learning experience for me. While gaining more experience in  tools and production environments, I learnt more about the design and development process and the challenges teams face to meet requirements within deadlines.

 

The team working on this game was composed of ten people other than myself, 5 artists and 6 programmers, all of whom were multitalented individuals. Building high quality art assets to create immersive environments was a key design requirement for the 2D and 3D artists in the team.

The project was originally called Panopticon (in reference to the building designed by Jeremy Bentham) because the concept was about a player whose every action is monitored and kept in check by the twitch users viewing the stream.The intention for the game was that it would be survival based. It was ambitious and exciting with a lot of potential.

 

A few months before the Sammy awards,we realized that a survival game would be too open ended for such a small team to complete in such a short amount of time. The team lead decided to completely change direction and switched the idea of a survivalist game to a series of competitive minigames where players interact with their viewers in an interesting player vs. viewer dynamic. A lot of the concepts for varying characters, biomes, flora and fauna were dropped even though myself and 4 other artists had already created many assets for them.

Taking the big picture into consideration, I saw how well the agile/scrum methodology worked because it allowed us to recognize the remaining work against timelines in order to prioritize and reorganize the work we had completed to meet pressing timelines.