Shutterbuds
A co-op exploration game where you take requests from magazine brands to take pictures of different creatures and structures within a national park.
05/02/2025
Lead Creature Designer
QA Manager
Made in UE5, Released on Steam
Cooper Thronson, Jeremiah Sink, Annie Granger, Hayden McManus, Brody Wenzel, Caleb Craig, Aidyn Short, Brayden Riddell, Casey Bowen, Eugene Jiang, Hannah Fasco, Jacob Nelan, Mariela Minino, Renee Bamford, Samantha Shomo, Xavier Olmstead
The original intent of shutterbuds was to lean into ai and making a “living world”, where the life around you feels like it has purpose to be there, belonging and having their place in the world.
The main gameplay loop of shutterbuds is only a couple steps. You accept quests from magazine brands to take pictures of creatures and structures. Then you head out into the trail to try and find whatever picture subject you may need. Once you do, you take the picture of it (along with any extra criteria such as “this creature and a player”), then head back to the board and submit your quest for rewards. There is more in between such as a shop to purchase items, unlocking new magazines to get quests from, exploration, and more.
I worked as the lead creature designer on our team, creating the logic and behaviors for all of our animals. Throughout the project we created 4 different animals, all serving their own purpose within the ecosystem, and in gameplay. I had to balance both of these factors to create creatures that feel like their behavior is believable, but also make for an interesting experience for the player. I also was responsible for things such as compendium entries for the creatures, where I wrote small paragraphs from a more scientific perspective, explaining what these creatures are and how they behave, to give the player more insight into these animals’ lives, and justify the behaviors they display to the player, like their diet, rituals, likes and dislikes, and more.
Along with designing creatures, I also worked as our designated QA manager on the team. I went to weekly sessions of Champlain College’s game testing lab, creating testing plans and forms to get the most valuable data to our team at the current time. This greatly helped shape our game for the better, providing many player insights on how a system could be improved, solutions to problems, and more. It also played a pivotal role in our bug testing, where tons of bugs throughout the project were discovered, figured out how to recreate them, and patched. Nearly 200 different bugs were found throughout the year lifespan of this project, which gave our programmers great prioritization on what needed to be fixed to make the game the best it could be.
Shutterbuds had the largest team I have worked with yet, starting with 9 people for one semester, and being expanded to 17 after our greenlight process. We worked together between our disciplines and roles effectively, not overstepping any boundaries that felt uncomfortable between members. In the second semester where we had 17 members, we split into two separate scrum teams, one focusing on the creatures and AI of the game, and the other working on the environment and quests. We had meetings for the respective teams and disciplines, using communication through Mattermost and in person to convey what most needed to be done, such as what people most wanted me to test in the testing lab that week, and many other things. The team was very healthy, keeping toxicity to an absolute minimum and respecting everyone’s expertise.
Shutterbuds came together quite nicely in the end of this project, with my role in the second semester as the QA manager playing a pivotal role in our ability to track and fix tons of bugs (over 250 at our time of code lock). There were a lot of rough patches for our team for various reasons of not wanting to cut features or cutting them too late, but ultimately we made those decisions in the end, and came together with the product we have today, which we are quite proud of.