Kyle Brunton
Lichcat
(Design Philosophy Video for the XPSummit 2023)
Project Management
Leadership
As the Project Manager of Lich-Cat I acted as an Enabling Leader. This leadership style is one where instead of simply giving out tasks you work with your team to ensure that they are doing the best work possible. I trusted each member of my team to be able to make good choices and that trust went both ways in that they trusted me to keep the Project on track.
As with any project, a number of issues arose. One example is that our original Spell system, which was meant to be a free-form drawing system, was not working. Whenever we had issues like this I had to lead the team in finding creative solutions. For the Spell system, I had the team run some brainstorming exercises which eventually lead to the rune system that is currently in the game.
For Lich-Cat working as an enabling and empowering leader ensured my team created a work that we are all proud to call our own!
Game Design
Design
For Lich-Cat all of our design decisions were made by committee. Some may say that this design style can’t work because team members will often be at odds with what the right decision should be. We made that work to our advantage by having mediated discussions about all of our ideas. Through these discussions, we almost always ended up with a 3rd idea that was better than either of the originals.
From this system, we were able to create a game that matched all of our visions rather than just the vision of a single designer. This empowered the team to constantly work harder to improve the game because they felt directly connected to the ideas.
The connection the team members felt to the project also allowed us to evolve the project as time went on. The design was constantly being iterated on to ensure that we had the best final product that we could have.