Week 5-6

Week 5

This week I’m going to take a little break from talking about the project, in order to detail some of my findings from the Guildford games fest, which we attended this week. I spent most of the day with my designer Michael and one of my artists, both of whom I’ve built quite a good rapport with. Whilst we spent a decent amount of time schmoozing around the stands and chatting with the recruiters, I feel the main value of the day came from the talks which were held.

Most of the ones I attended were more production leaning, with subject matters varying from CV creation, to acquiring funding for starting your own game company. The idea of starting up my own team is one that I kept in my mind since the course started and is something that I have considered undertaking in my placement year. I found the talks really helped to ground that idea and gave some good insights into the process. For example, one of the speakers made a good point about how it’s better to take the risk of starting your own business early on, as then most of the people you will be forming the team with will be more willing to take on that risk as they will be less invested in the entry level jobs that they have.

Whereas later, colleagues will be less likely to sacrifice their quality of life to take a risk. There was also a talk which I attended on audio in games, which I'd imagine is largely going to be my niche in projects to come. The speakers were mostly shilling a website that helped people learn game audio which I’ll have to look into, as whilst I’m confident with the basics, there’s still a vast amount in that field that I don’t yet know or understand.

Week 6

I’ve decided to scale down the number of entries in this dev diary to one every two weeks as with the more long-term nature of the project I’m finding it increasingly difficult to find interesting developments to write about every week.

This is something I’ve started to find with meetings as well, as I started to notice that the second meeting of the week has grown to be largely unnecessary. With the intention of keeping agile I've therefore decided to scrap the scheduled Thursday slot, and only call meetings with individuals when the need arises.

The Player Character

A good example of this was last week when we finished the prototype and started playtesting. Before we finalised the playtest build, I called a meeting with the leads in order to sort out any remaining issues that could be fixed before we started. I feel like this worked well as it only required a few members and we were able to make relatively significant improvements, which in turn allowed the feedback that we got from the tests this week to be much more focused and helpful.