Weeks 11 - 14

Weeks 11 & 12

Well, it’s been a While. After quite the chaotic easter I’m back In Portsmouth with a lot to do and very little time to do it in. Oh well, life goes on. We had a talk this week about dev diaries and how we should have been doing entries roughly every two weeks rather than one. Sorry about that Anna, hopefully hasn’t been too painful of a read thus far. There will probably only be one more entry after this before the big meaty retrospective on the whole year. So, what's been happening then? The project slowed down during Easter as was expected, but we’re still well on pace to finish before the deadline. We’re also likely going to be submitting to the graduate showcase, which is exciting, as it gives me a chance to show off my newly developed sound design skills alongside my already well-honed industry schmoozing skills. Whilst my easter was frankly an EC qualifying nightmare I did finally manage to prove to my team that I have actually been working on something this whole time. The sound design and audio programming that I have been learning for the past two months has finally paid dividends and has given our game ‘relatively’ well produced dynamic sounds and fully implemented audio middleware. Not to pat myself on the back too hard but this has massively raised the quality of the artefact to the point where I wish I’d gotten started on it much, much sooner. I’m still working on implementing a lot of the sounds and writing the few music tracks, but the pipeline is making a lot more sense and the ordeal has also meant that I’m now able to read C# Properly and help out with the bug fixing. So, nothing but positives on that front.

My FMOD Studio audio middleware Project

On the production side of things there's a large amount to talk about as well. Whilst things slowed down during the break most of the core seven devs made it to at least two of the meetings allowing us to keep progressing. Now that everyone is back in Portsmouth the team seems energised and eager to keep momentum on the final push towards the deadline. The more sporadic meetings have also helped squash a lot of issues as they’ve arisen and fostered communication and solid rapport between the devs. For example, this week Van was having issues regarding whether or not to include parallaxing for the backgrounds, and as such I called Michael in to help iron out what would be needed to make that process happen. In the end we were able to determine that it would be out of scope for the assessment deadline and figured out an alternative. I’m finding that we’re getting to the point where I’m having to slash more features to make the deadline. Luckily, by prioritising a solid foundation I think we’ll still end up with a game that's entertaining and we have enough manoeuvrability and slack in the implementation to hard pivot should something go really wrong in the next two weeks.

One other thing I’d like to talk about before I end off this entry is an insight into how my plans for next year have been going. Coming into this course I’ve had a bit of an ulterior objective. I wanted to gather as many talented devs as possible in order to create a team that can create something spectacular next year and perhaps beyond. In this endeavour I’ve been far more successful than I anticipated. Through my connections with Ellie in the first game Jam I’ve also managed to secure Rob, netting me arguably both the best 2D and 3D artists respectively. In the design and tech side of things I don’t see many people topping my lead Designer and Programmer from Don’t Turn as they’ve both been absolutely standout. I think with this amount of talent we’ll also have no problem attracting other talented devs, I think this is in part due to an undercurrent of frustration from many of the already skilled devs on the course. Many of them seem to resent the fact that their mixed dev teams are in some cases actively hampering their ability to produce good portfolio pieces from these game jams. Whilst this is something I fully intend to bring up at the next SVC the damage has largely already been done and I fully intend to take advantage of this opportunity. I’ll also have to really stay on the ball as If I’m working with exclusively talented devs then I’m likely going to be held to a much higher standard, and as such maintaining a positive reputation is likely going to be much harder. Especially as some might not have the highest of opinions about producers after prior bad experiences.

Weeks 13 & 14

Here we go, the last entry of this already exceptionally bloated dev blog. Congrats on making it this far! So, It’s nearing a week now since we ‘finished’ and submitted the dev project which is what I’d like to discuss first. Going into that final week I was happy with where Don’t Turn was at. It had been a playable game for a solid while and anything we could add on top would just improve it, and I think that the last week really showed how dedicated the team was to it. We went from having a decent game to having something that, in my opinion, blew the competition completely out of the water.

I had planned to have the game finished on Thursday, giving us ample time to finish the last 5-minute playthrough for the video. We ended up submitting 5 minutes before the deadline in a frankly nail-biting conclusion. This wasn’t a mismanagement on my part, however. Whilst we were waiting on the final backgrounds, Michael, Harvey and I, spent all Thursday and Friday right up until the deadline, improving the game in any way we could. The best part was that I didn’t even ask them to do this. Other people joined throughout the day but we spent nearly 13 hours straight on Thursday and another 8 on Friday in a completely unsolicited crunch, and none of us resented it, in fact when I talked to them afterwards it seemed we all really enjoyed it. I can’t say I’ve ever had that experience before. Every job or assessment I’ve had previously I’ve just considered to be work, just to be finished and not to be enjoyed. Yet this was actively engaging. We were constantly referring to the issues in the Jira and issues that had cropped up previously in development and conversing about them in order to make changes and fix things that would bring the game into the best possible state it could be for the deadline. Anything else that we thought was out of scope, I noted down and we kept for post launch fixes for the graduate showcase. It was amazing.

The final version of Don't Turns areas

To analyse it in a slightly more production focused manner, and in order to brag, I’d say that this mentality shown by the team members really showed that I did my job to at least a decent degree. I think by nurturing a good rapport, especially between the leads, and keeping everyone specialised and in feeling in charge of their own aspects of development, I managed to create a culture where the devs were all eager and excited to work on the game which they could be proud of. I remember that one of our programmers, Levi, said that when he was procrastinating on his other assessments, he would just work on Don’t Turn because he found it more comfortable, which I think is a nice testimony to my point. It also shows how the balancing of workload between devs depending on their skill levels worked great as well. Those with less commitment or skill could still feel like they were engaged with the project rather than feeling like they were being left behind, allowing for that all important team dynamic to flourish.

In the end, I’m very happy with how it turned out. I think we all came away with some great experience with group work and hopefully a positive attitude towards it. I’m also glad that I can feel like I did right by my team in allowing them to come away from the project with something to show off in their portfolios going forward.