Game Designer
E-Motions
Background/Process
Development Background
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The team was formed from people who couldn't find a team to join.
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The team started out with the size of 4 people, then it grew to 8 after 1 month into development.
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At the start of the project, professors tried to help the team understand what was needed of building a game with just a small group of programmers.
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Lots of the game's ideas, at the start, were tossed around by the team, professors, and teaching assistants which made it hard to focus on one general idea for the game.
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There was also a lack of leadership and direction within the team because no one knew what they wanted from the game.
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With the lack of leadership, no one knew exactly what they needed to do to make up their part of the engine.
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With the size of 4, not enough work for the engine could be made so that it can support the game's concepts.
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The communication within the team about the game was very minimal at the start.
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Most of the team really wasn't on board with the current game idea since it was difficult to develop for the idea.
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After getting new members, the team rescoped the idea to fit the responsibility of each member and the part of the team could discuss on design ideas.
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After the halfway point, the team started to struggle more in direction since not enough work was done for the engine to support the new ideas.
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Some team members weren't at the team space often so it became hard to communicate with them about their side of the work.
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Some of the programmers started having issues with the tech director and the way that he was building his systems to support the game's engine.
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The professors weren't around as often to help at this point in development but they did offer some advice when we asked.
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After 2/3 of the development time, I gave up the role of director and changed into a producer role where I tried to communicate through all of the team members to get us on track.
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I tried to work with the tech director in providing more information to the team on how the systems work with the game being built.
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I tried to get everyone in the team to stop arguing with each other and to start talking to one another more.
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I provided some plans on what the final build of the development should be like.
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At the end, I put together the project so that it could be shipped and graded by the professors.
Challenges
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Communication was difficult since some members were not around as often or that the members aren't fond with communicating about their side of the work.
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Most of the team didn't have a great idea on how to build the game's engine since it was the first time to jump into this type of project.
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Ideas tend to be overscoped and no one is able to see those ideas being too big for the team.
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There was a lack of leadership and producer at the start which made early to later planning a lot difficult to the development.
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There were some personal issues among the team members which sometimes conflicts with the team's motivations.
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There was less motivations and low morale throughout the development time.
Lessons Learned
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Communication and understanding is important when working with a team that can dynamically change throughout its development cycle.
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When people aren't working on the project with the team, take their advice with a grain of salt.
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When people have issues with anything, always make a meeting and talk about it instead of avoiding it or let it sit to build up.
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Indecisiveness in the early stages can cause future development problems because it would lack direction.
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Be patient with teammates, even if they aren't easy to work with them.