FPS Prototype

Vice and Virtue

Before Payday: The Heist, there was "Vice and Virtue". I was lead designer on an adversarial multiplayer game with heists, strategic planning, and tons of AI.

The Project:

Bank Heist was a co-operative, adversarial team based shooter designed to plan and carry out the perfect heist- or thwart it! We created Bank Heist at Controlled Chaos over a period of months while bootstrapping the company with other apps and contract work. 

My Roles:

Lead Designer:

• I took the concept our team wanted to build and designed, documented, then executed with the team over a period of months. 
• Wrote multiple versions of the game concept and GDD for not only internal teams, but as part of RFP processes with potential publishers.
• With our core team, went to several publishers to pitch the game. 

Level Designer:

• I designed and planned the prototype level and all available player and npc actions within it.
• I constructed most of the prototype level, and integrated the work of other designers who contributed sections.
• Through daily playtests and content drops, we iterated on the design itself as well as adding functionality as the prototype expanded.

Lessons Learned

Over a series of months, Bank Heist gained a deeper identity. Ultimately the game would be called "Vice and Virtue" but we failed to pick up a publisher for the project.

1] Build in the open. During Bank Heist's development, too much care was placed on remaining secret, at a time when indie development had shifted to building in the open. Had we blogged, posted, and created a community around our game, we would've staked a claim to the idea publicly.

2] Prototype vs Demo. As lead designer I adamantly wanted to complete all of our prototype gameplay, to have a complete picture of the game. But the decision was made to stop further development on new features, and attempt to make the level and rest of the game look good enough to show as a Demo. This was a tough pill to swallow, and led to the lack of deeper game mechanics for the Police team, and didn't allow for a high enough art bar to be set in the short time we had. 

3] Choosing the right technology. Bank Heist was built using source (Counterstrike), and eventually was updated with the Left4Dead source code. This was the right choice from the outset because of the speed with which we could attach gameplay to existing systems. Though Unreal had just announced much easier access to the Unreal source code, going with Source allowed us to create Bank Heist in a way that got us 80% of the way there.

Conclusion

Ultimately, one of the publishers we met with released their own bank heist game, 'Payday: The Heist', not long after we pitched. Without additional funding for Vice and Virtue, we drastically slowed the project to focus on continued continued work with partners and our other apps.