Larger Than Light is a puzzle platformer built around the manipulation of light and shadows by siblings Lux and Skia. Skia has the ability to control her shadow and Lux’s head is a lightbulb! Moving Lux through the environment of their old, abandoned middle school allows the player to move the shadows cast onto the wall to allow Skia to platform through the school. The characters must use their unique abilities to work together to escape from both the school and their past misdeeds. Larger Than Light comes out of the University of Southern California’s esteemed Advanced Games Program and was awarded the David vs Goliath grant at 2020’s IndieCade festival.
My Role: I was the Lead Producer on this year long project consisting of 25 remote developers. I was in charge of managing the team’s Jira project to assign tasks and track epic and user story progress to ensure we hit our milestones. I conducted weekly one-on-one meetings with the project’s team leads to review the prior week’s progress and agree upon tasks to move forward with for the upcoming week. I was in charge of onboarding the 14 people that joined the project throughout development on top of the original 11 developers who started on the project. This involved getting them set up on Google Drive, Jira, Discord, Git, and Unity before getting them connected with the rest of the team, relevant assets, and the game design document. In addition we added an associate producer to the project in mid-February, which was a wonderful opportunity to more effectively communicate my weekly work process, introduce them to the game macro and project overview, and train them to take over portions of task tracking and coordinating meetings!
I also acted as the main liaison to the 10 main Advanced Games Project faculty and USC Games Expo management that have acted as the game’s publisher for the past year. I was in charge of sending weekly reports on team progress, morale, tasks, and challenges as well as maintaining a separate task spreadsheet specifically to report progress to faculty. I also uploaded the latest build and a readme outlining progress since last build, known issues, game controls, and any notes required to run the game onto perforce every week. I was in charge of maintaining the team’s contact sheet and delivering required assets via Google Drive upon request. I also reported on milestone progress to faculty and was responsible for requesting additional development time to hit milestones if necessary.
Traverse shadows by manipulating light in this 2.5D puzzle platform game, Larger Than Light. Escape a haunted school as the sibling duo: Skia the shadow, who can move across other shadows on the wall, and Lux the lightbulb, who can manipulate the size and placement of shadows for his younger sister to platform across. Have them work together to break out of their old middle school while overcoming their bitter sibling rivalry.
Art Leads: Aylish Turner, Masato Lin
Programming Lead: Owen Mech
Design Lead: Jon Ranieri
Audio Lead: Austin Hammonds
Narrative Lead: Leeanna Albanese
Production Lead: Kelly Kim
Documentation Lead: Ben Heid
Quality Assurance Lead: David Barrett
Programmers: Alaina Palmer, Coco Zhang, Colin Spirirdonov, Charlie Feuerborn, David Barrett, Justin Sindecuse-Hayden, Ryan Levy
Game Designers: Alaina Palmer, Alisa Chen, Aylish Turner, Ben Heid, Charlie Feuerborn, Coco Zhang, Colin Spiridonov, David Barrett, Owen Mech
Artists: Alisa Chen, Masato Lin, Rachel Yu, Ryan Levy
Animators: Aylish Turner, Justin Sindecuse-Hayden, Masato Lin, Ryan Levy
Contracted Music: Brett Bailey, Matt Miller, Prateek Rajagopal
Narrative Designers: Aylish Turner, Coco Zhang, Masato Lin, Ryan Levy
Producers: Ben Heid, Sam Mehdi
Quality Assurance Managers: Ben Heid, Charlie Feuerborn, Colin Spiridonov, David Barrett, Jon Ranieri, Justin Syndecuse-Hayden, Leeanna Albanese, Masato Lin, Owen Mech, Ryan Levy
Marketing: Aylish Turner, Rachel Yu