Release: 2010
Platform: Xbox 360 & Kinect
Studio: Harmonix
Publisher: Disney Interactive Studios
website

Designed as spiritual successor to the original film, Fantasia: Music Evolved hoped to be, as Walt Disney described his masterpiece: "a voyage of discovery in the realms of color, sound, and motion".

The game was a sprawling endeavor, with a dozen unique environments to navigate, and scores of songs to play.  True to Disney form, each piece had a team of people dedicated to its every nuance, in hopes of creating a greater whole.  This stretched across the country, where a Disney user research team in Los Angeles worked in tandem with our team at Harmonix.

In my previous months as a designer, I had been embeded on scrum teams, and attended daily standups.  This allowed me to be constantly aware of a feature's journey to completion, and attitudes and goals of the team.  I did the same on this project, and integrated myself or another member of my department into any team whose feature was actively iterating, or due to be playtested at the end of their sprint. 

This allowed us to keep close tabs on the feature's current progress, bugs, and goals, and consult on design and production choices.  As an integral part of the team, we were able to rapidly evaluate and iterate on features, and keep the team enthusiastic about players' experiences.


My contributions included...

• Integrating research and evaluation into Agile production processes.
• Creating milestone schedules and designing test plans for Disney's user research labs.
• Managing rapid iteration, testing, and signoff of features from prototype to final polish stages.
• Developing gameplay and interaction controls in overworld and song play levels.

 
Typical design questions

• What interactions with the world feel magical?
• What motions make me feel like a sorceror?
• Can we create beautiful audiovisual landscapes that also function as UI?
• How can we allow for exuberant physical expression but filter what Kinect detects as deliberate input?