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Ethan Sawyer

Role: Director

In production

Scare Crow is a humorous 3rd person stealth/tower-defense game where you play as a crow, pulling pranks on squirrels to scare them away from your food

Scare Crow

In Scare Crow you fend off waves of invading squirrels by setting traps, lures, and hiding spots, which you then trigger at the perfect moment as the squirrels walk by. Get it right, and they'll run off your lawn screaming their heads off

Greenlight

Scare Crow was one of 55 pitches made to USC Games in Spring 2024. After a 2-step greenlight process, my pitch was one of 8 that were given the green!

If you make it through greenlighting, you become the creative director of a studio at USC, and have to attract other students to work on the game with you. After personally holding over 70 interviews with potential candidates, I put together the 30 best I could find and got to work.

Pre-Pre-Production

Over the summer of 2024, me and a small subset of the team worked on the basic elements of gameplay: flying around, scaring squirrels, and setting traps. We had a lot of failed experiments during this time, but it was great practice for myself and the rest of the team, and taught us a lot about what we wanted to make: an accessible, cartoonish game about defending territory that people would laugh all the way through.

Pre-Production

As our summer experiments wound down, I set a goal for the team: at the end of Fall, we would have an unpolished, playable version of the final game that made sense to newbies and evoked the humorous, sneaky emotions we were going for.

Since this was still pre-production, the smaller details of design were very malleable and changed every week as we ran playtests. The main thing I did as director was help pick which changes to make, commit to them early and make sure everybody knew about them. The rest I owe to my wonderful team.

Production

This is where we currently are. Now that we have the skeleton of the final game, we’ll be spending all our time on polish. For us, a big part of polish is adding in all the little jokes and gags that will give our bird and squirrel characters more personality, and balancing what is currently a stupidly-easy game. I will update this section as the game progresses!