Final thoughts before game turn in. Game Designers perspective.
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Hello again! At last, we are the final mandatory blog post for this course, I must say, it has been a great ride with many ups and downs. In the end, I believe everyone in our team comes out as both better prepared and stronger individuals with a much broader skillset. Creating interactive entertainment is now a greater part of our lives. This week I will sort of give a short post-mortem on how our development process have been, what could have been better, what went right and so forth. Early stages of development: As most projects do, we begun slow. Filled out all the necessities from the scrum handbook, scribbled down ideas at the first few brain-storm meetings, assigned individual roles and so forth. The first few weeks in actual development we had a lot of great overblown ideas that we naturally thought would be easy to implement, alas that is rarely ever the case in product development. One of those ideas were to utilize a certain third-party software named Tiled, which would have allowed the artists to easily place tiles, assets and collision boxes freely in a very intuitive way. Mid stages: After we got back on our feet after the rather, to be blunt, bad decision to attempt to utilize a third-party software in our very first game-project, things begun to go our way. We rather quickly managed to scramble together a fully fleshed out game design document. The basic buildings blocks for the game. Such as working movement, projectiles and map constraints/collisions. Among the artists, we realized we all just went our own merry ways when creating assets. Which, quite obviously creates drastically different styles for each asset. Which is a rather big problem on its own. Thus, the lead artist was tasked to create style guides so we could prevent the issue in the future. End stages: In the last few weeks it was rather hectic, messy code had to be rewritten, art-assets re-drawn and remade. In essence it was basically stitching and patching up everything that had been done in the previous weeks. A lot of previously missed features have seen the light into the actual playable game, it is all coming together at a brisk pace. As usual, more time would never hurt, but, once again, that is just another part of product development in general. It was also at this stage we realized that a lot of the “cool” features such as lighting and other effects sadly would have be cut out from the “finished” game, there simply is no time left to include all the great grand features, events and sequences we had in mind. What could have gone better: The aforementioned decision to attempt to implement an external third-party software into our freshly-baked code cost us a few precious weeks and we came out empty handed from it. It was a good idea in theory and the potential was great, unfortunately it required a lot of external help and was beyond the coders at the time skill levels. Thus it probably would have hurt their development as coders as a whole in the long run, so it was at its later stages, dropped. This could have been avoided with more honest communication. All the team members had doubts if it was a good idea on and off on a day to day basis. It was too uncertain and we should have realized it much, much earlier. Instead of attempting to cling on to the thin line of the thread it was hanging on throughout. And the always returning rather large issue… Better planning ahead and a person in charge who can be firm when necessary. We constantly make the mistake to tread lightly and not set decisions hard in stone. Flexibility is important, but clear guidelines must first be established before they can be bent. Mucking around in an already messy situation only makes it worse. The scrum planning, went for the better part fine, however. The dates in the backlog and the task tracker was put in the backseat quite early since it was rather cumbersome to deal with and keep track of it with Google Docs. I personally believe that the dates would have been a great incentive to work even harder for everyone in the group, or better put, more efficiently. What went right: The team’s spirit was great and we can get work done once we have clearly established what needs to be done, with a heavy emphasis on clearness. The presentations went great, a lot of useful and tangible feedback was received as usual. Team performance: The effort the team put in to the project was more than satisfactory, everyone worked well beyond their required hours and despite all the issues we have had, there has been no heavy drama or in-fighting one would expect having heard from the second and third year students. Overall, it was smooth sailing with a few rocky waves along the way, but that usually is just part of working together with other people. My role in it all: I was assigned the role as the Game Designer and it was my task to, well, design the game. It was early on decided that the roles would not carry that much weight in essence overall. In hindsight, I feel that was a bit of a blunder. After I finished the task to write the game design document, I was then in the position of feeling the need to make something more “tangible” such as art assets and similar. Thus I left the position as designer behind whilst doing tasks I thought was expected of me as an artist instead. What I should have done, is to put the art tasks on the back burner. Instead I should have whole-heartedly taken tasks that lied close to the role as game designer. One of those tasks could have been to handle the level design for the game both practically and the layout/narrative part I wrote for the game design document, among other design tasks. In short, what we will bring with us to future projects: As always, better planning. Be prepared to cut off excessive parts that we really would have liked to be included in the game. Basically, the main principles lean and agile scrum in product development stands for. Other than that, here is an image of an asset that is currently being redesigned. OLD —————-> NEW That’s all I have for this week! As always, have a great continued week and weekend! 🙂 //Morgan Note: I apologize in advance for the messy text, erratic grammar and sentences, if there are any. This was written in a hurry. Feel free to point any out!  |
