Recap

These last few weeks have gone by quite quickly and they’ve had a lot going on.

I’ve been having some conversations back and forth with our contracted audio designer Ben Van DeWater about having an additional game song and/or menu music. We’ve decided that before Spring Break Ben is planning on submitting to the team a number of samples that we can listen to and then decide from those samples which we would like to be fleshed out into full length songs for the menu or in-game.

The designers have been busy completing the whiteboxing of their levels and the artists have also been hard at work. The character’s animations are nearly complete and the remaining artists have been cranking out assets for the levels, placeable and native.

Our programmers have been working on a number of things. Tom has mostly been focused on using something called Metaballs to make the bullets coming out of the gun look more liquid rather than individual bullets and it looks phenomenal. Dan has been working on the overheat mechanic which is displayed in a radial around the player’s targeting reticle. Dan also talked to one of Champlain’s professors about scaleform software licensing that we could use for our UI which would be fantastic because it uses a scripting language that Tom basically breathes.

Implementation

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been watching the Olympics nonstop for the past several days but whenever I’m thinking about the state of our game, the Olympic theme song starts playing in my head. Features are being fully fleshed out, all of our levels have been whiteboxed, and art assets are starting to come into play to be put around the levels. Also, now that the Lead Artist has finished most of his work on the character, he can be reallocated to environment art as well to boost that productivity.

 

Implementing features into a game and seeing how players respond to them in QA is one of my favorite parts of being involved in making games. When testers ask for a certain feature or tweak and the next week it’s in the game, they are super stoked about it and getting fresh eyes on a game we’ve seen for literally 6 months can be critical in pointing out simple tweaks that really change the game experience.

Hopefully by Wednesday night’s QA session we will have the gun overheat, the health, and the stamina UI all fully functioning and into the game. The lobby is also getting final touches and Tom our Lead Programmer is working on making the game fully encapsulated to we can start games over without needing to reboot the whole Unity program.

Super stoked!

Dependencies

This past week we made good things happen. I took a look at the overarching plan of the semester and realized we’re quickly approaching a bottleneck in the art pipeline, especially with an expected two additional levels on the horizon for the rest of the semester. I discussed this concern with my Lead Artist and later that day at our team meeting, he was already breaking down a list of priorities and assigning them to the other artists. I was so proud.

Now that we have that moving along swiftly, the overall pipeline is looking a lot smoother and achievable for this semester which makes me feel a lot better. I’ll be keeping an eye on everything moving forward but now at least my #1 concern is off the table. Huzzah.

Feature Creep

The phrase “Yea, but wouldn’t it be cool if…?” was heard all too often this week, and while I do encourage creativity and new ideas, we already have more on our plate than we know what to do with, and I’d much rather polish a few levels and game modes well than have a bunch scattered about, half working, and sorta okay.

It can be hard to try and curb the creative team but I’m fortunate enough to be in a situation where we’ve earned each others’ respect and so we value each others’s opinions and the team recognizes that as a producer, even though I might not know as much as they do in their individual technical fields, the team does recognize that I am the one responsible for keeping scope in check and that I know how the pipeline is shaping up.

The big change this week was that our programming division made a decision to stick with the original code base instead of switching everything over to an authoritative server and now that they’ve made that decision, they can really start cleaning up the code from last semester and implementing features that we need to test in QA.

Designers have narrowed down the different game modes that they want to implement into the game and what steps need to be taken to change that, and now that the artists have decided on where between “Cartoony” and “Realistic” the art style will be, they’ve started running on all cylinders making assets.

I am VERY excited to get into these next few weeks and really start to see some changes in our game and put direct feedback from QA into the game.

Heating Up

Heading into the third week of the semester, the ground work of the skeleton plan has been set out. The leads are working closely with the rest of the team, I’m making sure everyone knows the scope limitations to what is feasible for the time we have available, and priority lists have been made.

This Sunday will mark our first Team Feast courtesy of Moe’s Catering, and I’ve collaborated with another one of the team’s producers to buy ~$200 worth of burritos and other Mexican accouterments. We are all quite excited about it and it will fuel our Vacuulab production machine to victory.

I’ve gone through the team’s wiki on Chili Project and have given a small seminar to the new guys on the team to familiarize them with how we log our user stories and sub tasks so they’re uniform across the team.

We also decided we would have one-week sprints and take small steps but try and crush them every time. Our sprints start and end every Wednesday because that’s when we have our Senior Production class in which a new playable build is due anyway so we can show off what we’ve accomplished over the past week.

I’m very excited for this semester and for the team as a whole. The Heartthrob Studios machine is just heating up.

Round II, FIGHT!

Winter Break has passed all too quickly and so we find our hero launching into the final semester of college. That’s quite the realization in itself.

The team has now doubled in size to 3 artists, 2 programmers, 2 designers, and myself for a total of 8. I’m very excited about how the draft went that resulted in our team size and who was added to our team.

I led an introductory meeting on Wednesday that covered some basic goals and outline for the semester. The team got to talk to each other and ties within each department already started developing between them.

We decided when/where we wanted to meet and this weekend the team will begin brainstorming and nailing down what exactly we’re going to be doing.

Personally, I’m now starting to do some serious house cleaning with the Chili Project wiki page on our site and add in the new team members etc. Here we go!

End Game

We made it. Vacuulab was selected as one of the games to move on into the second semester and we have acquired 4 additional members. All of the leads are all super stoked about it and we’re looking forward to developing our game further.

One of the end semester assignments was a reflective essay, and here are some selections from what I wrote:

This semester has been one filled with new experiences and learning opportunities. I had the pleasure of being the lead producer of a team of four Champlain College seniors making a fully functional vertical slice of a game. The game we chose to make is a third person shooter three team battle-royale in which the teams participate in a death match in a laboratory-esque environment. What separates our game from many other third person shooters is two of our central mechanics: vacuuming and sloshing. Vacuuming is a mechanic that enables the player to switch from a gun to vacuum and suck up an enemy that is 25% health or lower. Once vacuumed, the enemy can be seen in the backpack of the vacuumer. Once vacuumed, sloshing comes into play. The player who got vacuumed (the vacumee), can hold left and right (A and D) to “slosh” in the opponents backpack, altering their movement in order to drag them into environmental hazards or into allied crossfire. Sloshing helps keep the player engaged during the respawn time instead of just sitting and waiting for a traditional timer to count down. Once an enemy has been vacuumed in, the vacuumer can run back to their base and deposit an enemy’s goo into the receptacle to give their team +1 lives.

we have the game we want to make.

This iterative process taught all of us to never become too attached to one idea because it’s always subject to change and to be open to new ideas as they come in because they very well could be (or should be) better than the ones that have been thought up before. The process (which took several weeks and many meetings) showed all of us how difficult it can be to pin down ideas that not only everyone likes but concepts that are feasible in terms of scope and possibility. It also showed people how fun brainstorming and spit-balling can be as well (there were many-a-whiteboard covered with sketches and drawings).

Our team believes our game will be well received by our target audience (parent + kid gamer combos) because it does not contain any exclusionary content to either social section. There’s no blood and gore, no sexual content, no profanity, and the control scheme is quite intuitive. Our game does contain action, humor, fast-paced combat, and an overall goofy feel, so both kids and parents who are interested in video games would be interested and we hope they will choose our game as one they can enjoy together. People who are not younger kids or parents who like to play video games would also enjoy our game because it’s a third person shooter with great art, and a load of fun, silly, goofiness to be had. Nobody on our development team is in our primary target market but we all love to play test our game, ever after hours and hours of doing so.

Our game’s appeal of being a fast-paced, goofy, third person shooter shows that we believe some of the core values of a successful game ensure the player is enjoying the experience and they may be laughing, shouting, and cheering for their team mates and themselves. We love games that involve team work and this cooperative play has been a core element to many successful games recently which is one of the reasons why we included it.

Vacuulab’s technical attributes and hardware systems are most closely aligned with PC gamers although it is Xbox controller compatible as well. We believe this is the best and easiest way to reach our target because adults typically have a personal or work laptop and their children usually have a personal laptop or a home computer that they can use. Not all families have an Xbox but if people enjoy playing with the controller, that’s okay too, because they can simply plug their controller into a computer and play.

Developing our core mechanics and systems has taught me that people love new elements. There aren’t any games out there that allow you to slosh back and forth in the backpack of an enemy after they kill you to extract your revenge on them. Same thing goes for the vacuuming, people visibly smile and laugh when they vacuum up their first enemy and the satisfaction on their faces makes the whole development team happy. This important facet of keeping fresh mechanics and parts of gameplay on the table shows that players are always looking for the newest craze that they’ve never tried before, so moving forward into the second semester we’re going to try and include those new bits into our game.

The arc of our game’s development taught the team how important patience can be during the conceptual development stages of making a game as we went for weeks trying to nail down what concept we wanted to run with.

Through the many weeks following our conceptual completion, there were a variety of challenges involved with collaborative work. Aligning four schedules and figuring out when would the best time be for the team to meet was one of the challenges I solved as early in the semester as I could, and once we had it down, the team was strongly encouraged to make all of the meetings. Missing bridges in some of the software between departments was also a bit of a challenge when using Maya because the artist and the programmer both knew about parts of it, but putting it all together became a bit of a hassle sometimes. Thankfully the designer on the team was able to aid in conjoining the two and both the artist and programmer were incredibly diligent in spending time to learn how to make their work transfer to a finished product.

In terms of personal reflection, I learned that I’m much better at helping other people make deadlines than I am at making them myself, because I got behind on my blog posts for many weeks straight. I’m proud of the work I did with meeting all of the deadlines and keeping the team moving to make it to the next stage ASAP. One of the things I could have improved on is wrapping things up at the end of the project. Once our final presentation was made, the whole team basically dropped interest in the class and moved on to other projects. This is understandable because we are all students and have other classes but our Chili Project backlog was pretty open-ended and I should have been a bit more adamant about cleaning that up and following up. I also meant to have the facebook and Youtube pages up and circulating sooner as well. Now that the first semester is over, I can’t wait to see what the team can accomplish now that we’ve doubled in size after making acquisitions from other teams.

Crunch Time

Well, here we are ladies and gentlemen, coming down the home stretch until the end-of-semester presentations in the Aud in front of the panel of judges to determine if we will continue working second semester or if we will be cut and then dispersed and absorbed into other teams. It’s quite a bit of pressure, really, especially as the Producer, I’m traditionally the one who does most of the talking during these types of functions. I wouldn’t say I have a problem with this, I’m merely suggesting it might be nice to just stand up there and wait for it to be over like some other team members. However, this isn’t the case with our team anyway because each lead presents what their own division has decided/is working on/will work on, so not ALL the pressure is on me. Still, it’s a “Big Ting” as one of my friends would say.
Thankfully, our team has already practiced our final presentation and gotten feedback from many of the professors who will be on that very same panel, so now we’ve just gotta make a few changes and crush the next one out of the park. It’s nice being on a team who’s game theme is one that’s goofy and silly because that enables us to embrace the theme as a whole and say be more casual during the presentation, perhaps dress the part, and have our slideshow also a bit goofy and whimsical. We’re not entirely sure how we’re gonna dress for the presentation if we want to dress goofy or continue with our professional studio theme but that’s something to talk about.

The game itself is pretty fantastic so far, Chris is crushing artwork tonight to put into the game and Tom just sank about 6 hours into the prototype fixing a variety of smaller things.

The gooey (GUI, get it?) is now in and we’re also quite excited about that. Multiple bars to see what team has how many lives, hp, stamina, which weapon you’re currently using, it’s all there, makes me feel warm n fuzzy inside. Tomorrow we’re challenging Stage IV and going out for a team dinner after, hopefully to drink to victory and not to denial, but only time will tell.

Goooo TEAM!

The Show Must Go On

This past week has been one of general chaos for most members of the team. Since every member is a full-time student, when midterms come around the corner, everyone’s workload increases exponentially. Not to mention our team is one of the most physically active teams in our year with Rugby, Soccer, and personal lifting all on our schedules as another ball to juggle. However, among all of this juggling and work to do, everyone on the team made great advances in their individual divisions. I’ve also reminded everyone to keep coming back to our central list for every sprint to keep tracking which items are the highest priority.

One of the things I love the most about this team is that I’m able to comfortably rely on them for their own autonomy. I’m not going to be in class this Friday (the 25th) and our team was hoping to challenge the next Stage Challenge in our class, and if we pass it, we will be one of the very few at that stage in our development process. Even though I’m the one who drags in elements of everyone’s work into a presentation and I usually also handle all of the QA feedback etc, I know my team will be able to pick up the parts I’m not there to present. I’ve still made the presentation and answered all of the questions required for the stage within it to help out my team as much as I can before I leave, and I’m quite excited for the results tomorrow.

Even though the Producer is temporarily out of the picture, the show must go on, and I’m pleased to have a team who can step it up and still crush it, even with a man down.

Blueprints

This past week I started focusing on our projected time left.

Taking a look at the calendar it was fairly frightening, realizing we only really have about 4 weeks left and there is still a LOT of work to be done. One of my least favorite things about being in the producer position is that I can’t help with the technical work in the game. Even if I had invested time into learning Maya better or some programming languages, I truly do believe that I would just do more harm than good because anything I would produce would be so under the level that my team is capable of producing they’d just scrap it or spend too much time trying to fix it. So instead I just need to focus on clearing the path for creativity and try to lay out tasks in the most efficient way possible to optimize logged time and keep the central vision moving.

I went back into my original planned sprints page and completely butchered it. Sliced off irrelevant or unimportant and vague points to shrink down the number of sprints to match how many weeks we had left. Specified what each division would be working on each week, and if they were done, listed all of the following week’s tasks as well so they could start chewing on those if they found themselves ahead of schedule.

At the meeting  I talked to the team about what they would be working on and asked if they felt each week’s blueprint of work for that sprint was fair and doable. Making necessary adjustments and allocating tasks around to different weeks if necessary to try and spread the workload as evenly as possible. I also talked with the team about having this sprint planning page be a central location to check with and cross off items as they do them so everyone has a visual as to what other people are working on and where they are with it. This semi-public checklist helps motivate the team while simultaneously keeping them organized and on track (hopefully). I’m looking forward to seeing how this new and improved lay out performs in the following weeks.