Game Studio II Development Blog

Written over the Spring 2022 Semester at Champlain College

 1/24/22 "Where we Are Now"

Personally, overall,  I think I’m pretty happy with where I am right now as a game developer. As a game designer, one of the things that’s been drilled into me is that I have to at least have some  experience across all disciplines, in order to better communicate, to temper expectations, and to understand limits, and at this point I’ve had enough personal experience, I think, to understand that. I’ve also learned a lot about my limits when it comes to those aspects of production, so it’s been an interesting learning experience and mental switch that I have to make between working on solo projects and cross-disciplinary team projects when it comes to scope and designing systems and mechanics. What I’m saying with that is that one of my key strengths is understanding my role, my team member’s roles, and how we’re all supposed to work together to make something. Another key strength I pride myself on, that ties into that is my flexibility, both in the sense that I’m very comfortable with and capable of changing or adapting aspects of the design due to limitations or unforeseen circumstances. I am also very willing to listen to suggestions, or incorporate other people’s ideas into my concepts or combine a lot of disparate ideas into something coherent. I  think I’m quite empathetic as well, and so I also notice that if something gets presented to me and it’s not quite as I pictured it, either due to mis/a lack of communication, I’m more likely to try t adapt my design rather than ask them to redo their work (this is more so the case with builds, rather than with art concepts). However, I’ve been thinking about the area that I think I could personally see the most improvement in myself will serve to mitigate that in a way. The thing I really want to get better at this semester, and I imagine it will be easier once we start doing longer sprints, is keeping better communication with my programmers to make sure the design and product match so that we stay on the same page so that changes are mutual instead of compromises, and so that I can leave my mark on the core systems in a way that I fell that I haven’t yet, and that I really should have. 

2/16/22 "Most Successful Sprint"

Looking back, I think our team’s strongest prototyping week was our third prototype week, the first week we started working on Binx. Our decision-making process throughout these initial three prototypes stemmed from a list of concepts that was made up of ideas created by team members independently that we created before our first real meeting, part of that first meeting then was devoted to going through that list,  and having each team member explain the concept, and then we would go through and pick the ones we wanted to work on, factoring in things like technical feasibility along with whether or not we simply liked the concept, with the idea being, that we would go on to actually prototype the ones we liked the most as a group. 

Using this system we built Hook-Line-Sinker, and Ele-Mental. Both  of those prototypes were fine in my mind, and for a long while, I wanted to bring Ele-Mental forward because I saw potential in it, but the issue with all of these that I recognise now, and a flaw with our system overall, is that they were solely one person’s idea. That person had a concept in mind, and then we all sort of had to interpret it to make something that fit their vision. 

With Binx though, I feel like it was much more of a collective effort. Binx came out of us deciding as a group that our initial third favorite idea, a recreation of a carnival-style shooting gallery game, wasn’t actually going to be that interesting to create in the one week we had to do the initial prototype, and so instead, we took two ideas that we had passed over initially, and combined them into the exploration-focused 3D platformer where you play as a bee that became Binx. Binx has been our most successful overall prototype because not only do we all fully understand it, and have a shared vision for it, from the beginning, unlike the two previous ones, we all have a stake in it, and we all have equal voice in it. As a designer, I’m not trying to translate an artist or programmer’s concept into a fleshed out game loop, I’m creating that game loop myself, and asking “how does this look and feel?”, rather than “Is this what you had in mind?”, which feels really good. This isn’t only me either, I’m noticing it too with the artists and programmer, there’s something about this project that just feels more collaborative than the last two. I don’t doubt that part of that is because we’ve been working together already all semester, and we feel more comfortable working together, but I definitely think that most of it comes from the collective ownership we’ve taken over this project, that the first two just didn’t have.

4/5/22 "Most Challenging Sprint"

Without a doubt, the two most challenging weeks in Binx’s development process have been these past two weeks. With the first week (Our first week back after Spring break), being the more challenging of the two. The reason those weeks were so challenging is that our lead programmer, and more importantly, the person who had stepped in to take over most of the producer role’s responsibilities had personal issues going on that meant that they were completely out of action for those two weeks. We got one message from them at the start of both of those weeks letting us know that they were at least okay, but they didn’t attend class or meetings, and didn’t communicate with us regularly outside meetings, which means that they also didn’t contribute to progressing the project forward, which was even more not helpful for us, because they’re also the one who’s generally responsible for managing the build, merging branches and making sure everything is playing nice together.

What this meant for the rest of the team is that for these two weeks we all made progress on our individual parts of the whole project. Assets were made, systems were programmed,  and levels were built, but at the end of it, we didn’t have a complete build or concrete way to show our progress. The roughness and challenge of that  first week after spring break was not only hampered by having the void of that core missing team member, but also that the team members who were attending also happening to be dealing with other external issues not entirely within their control which meant that even though they were present, their progress was being made slower than usual or than expected. 

As for what I could have done differently, I think that I could have stepped up more. I think I let Aster’s absence get to me too much, compared to the rest of the team, I was doing pretty okay mentally, and I think that I could have stepped up and  used that capacity to take over the producer responsibilities more than I did, as well as take more charge over the build and do the merging, and the exterior level design with the assets that our Artists made so that we would be able to have a more gradual example of our progression over these past two weeks, instead of nothing, and then a complete redesign, like our current plan is.