Week 11 – Postmortem

Working on this project for the past term has honestly been a challenge. I love the potential Swat the Bug possesses; should we keep working on it, this could be an actually unique product. Due to the difficult production (honestly, what game isn’t difficult?), should we continue development?

Of course we should!

This week I also did a bit of work on the game from San Francisco:

• Helped Anna write the outline for the presentation and edited the actual presentation
• Added the pickup points on every weapon
• Tried to make a better light-switch. Said switch has an orange light, but doesn’t flip position upon collision. Jal ended up taking care of this. Thanks Jal.

Lessons Learned

Overall, I’d say the team worked well together. There definitely were moments of communication failures (“stop assuming!”), but we seemed to get through this without too much drama.

For design lessons, I think I learned, first hand, that a designer must wear multiple hats. I enjoyed this immensely. Not just as a bullet point on my resume; that part’s very nice.  I relished the hat juggling because I was helping out the team.

I do wish that certain design decisions had been made clear far earlier in the life of the project. I’m not trying to shift or take blame, but that hampered our progress. Our communication also did slow progress, as did the art production. Next time, someone else should have either filled the art lead role, or taken Anna’s producer responsibilities. She’s fantastic at both, but at multiple points she was overwhelmed with model revisions and the like. The art team though, man, they seriously brought it. Our game looks great.

I also felt a distinct uneasiness of where I stood in the decision making process. The game is Kai-Lin’s baby, but at other times production was much more fluid. I think Kai-Lin also needing to approve everything became a bottle-neck at later points in development as well. And it goes without saying that Jal went above and beyond with this game, being the sole dedicated programmer.

The Road Not Taken

In the future, I will push to have a working, simple prototype as soon as humanly possible. Maybe adopting John Berton’s “rough to fine” mantra of requiring a new pass of the entire project every week. Aka use Scrum development more extensively. I’m also going to set deadline milestones in all my projects going forward (to be fair, we did this), but adopt a mindset of not turning back and redoing earlier decisions once a point in time has been passed. Should we continue development, I’d like to see the game evolve into a number of modes, destructible environment objects, more weapons, and see the return of the beloved mini-games.

Week 9 – Pulling Things Together

This week I and Anna decided upon a color pallet, I continued to import models into the game, continued to put some basic colors on everything, redesigned the room for more maneuverability, fixed colliders, organized the folders in Unity (things got pretty cluttered), started to animate Sleepy before switching jobs with Kai-Lin, and wrote two sound scripts.

• Environment layout, fixes, and texturing (4 hours)
• Sound scripts and attaching (1 1/2 hours)
• Animating (1 hour)

New layout!

One of many objects that now has a texture in game.

Positive

The game is slowly but surely coming together into some kind of being. Building up the environment has been very satisfying, as was scripting. Not nearly on the same level as Joe, but still fun. The team seems to be communicating much more – big plus.

Negative

Having only one dedicated programmer is really becoming a weakness for us. Joe is working his butt off, and we still haven’t playtested. Discovering the Sleepy rig needed to be re-rigged was incredibly annoying, and not a setback that we needed at this stage.

Solutions & Suggestions

I’m not sure what else to offer up here other than everyone needs to work on this as much as possible over the next week.

Week 8 – Animations and Scene Dressing

This week I shifted over to doing jobs that needed to be done.  Does that make sense? With no more design work to do, I’ve been filling in the gaps where I can. I’ve been pretty busy this week!

• Went through and gave notes on some sound files Teslim uploaded (1 hour)
• Imported every model made so far, and placed them in scene (2 hours)
• Exported two models to fbx, and renamed everything with a “polySurface” (2 hours)
• Added colliders to every game object (2 hours)
• Added some basic textures to the scene (1 hour)
• Made a very rough Sleepy swatting animation and exported it (1.5 hours)
• Meetings and critiques (1 hour)

Look at that clashing color!

Positive

I liked helping out the team. Adding models to the game and placing colliders, while tedious, was very satisfying once I finished. I’m also extremely glad that the team had a talk about assumptions and communication – this has been a serious issue for us, so I hope that going forward everyone is more open.

Negative

The assumptions that were made…it’s killing us. Kai-Lin assumed I would animate Sleepy a certain way, and I assumed another when he told me “quick and dirty.” Seeing the amount of stress and workload that’s been placed on Anna for yet another week also is a huge negative. Some team members really need to pick up the slack because it’s not fair to the rest of us. This was, to be fair, addressed in the meeting, but this has to be reiterated. I am concerned that it’s week 8 and we still don’t have a prototype to playtest, and the only answer I have is that it’s because some members did not contribute enough, or spent too much time on one or two things. Finally – everyone has to be autonomous but not completely shut off. Everyone needs to assume(!!) some direction over what to do, and not ask a million questions, but at the same time the polar opposite is just as damaging.

Solutions & Suggestions

I think my negative paragraph rant covers anything I could’ve said here. This could be a seriously cool game – let’s get this thing made.

Week 7 – Fixes and Sound

This week I switched over to sound effects, as Teslim was overloaded with work. Production is definitely in the hurry up and wait phase for those of us who aren’t on the art team. I also redid ratios for objects and furniture several times – who’d have thought that Ikea measurements don’t translate well to game worlds? Excited to record thirty seconds of white noise this week.

• Sound effects list (1 hour)
• Finding sound effects (2 hours)
• Adjust object ratios and assets in game world (2 hours)
• Heatmap for weapons (1/2 hour)
• Meeting (1 hour)

POSITIVE

This was a light week. My thesis is in much better shape! Seriously though, I don’t like not having work to do. Sound is always fun to find and or create. Looking forward to animating Sleepyhead when the model is finished.

NEGATIVE

Not having enough to do, it seems. Odd as it felt like this game was popping into my life on a daily basis. Nature of having to fix work I did incorrectly, I guess.

SOLUTIONS & SUGGESTIONS

It’s not the end of the world if you need to fix something.

Week 6 – Designing a Mini Game and Refinements

 

This week, with Sleepy’s apartment being so cramped, I updated the floor space and rearranged/redesigned some of the furniture. I also defined the sizes of interactive object, the challenge there being that if I base the measurements off of real world objects, then they wouldn’t size correctly in the game world. But if I based them off game world measurements, then certain objects would look odd. During my measuring, I found some pieces of furniture for the art team to use. Finally, I designed the mini game for when Mosquito lands on Sleepy’s arm. This was the bulk of my work this week.

• Mini game design and mockups – 4 hours
• Object sizes – 2 hours
• Meetings – 1.5 hours
• Apt resizing – 1 hour

POSITIVE

Designing the Suckspot mini game was incredibly fun for me. After a few iterations I decided on the rhythm based game. Add some borrowing from Amplitude and I had some game rules.

NEGATIVE

I would’ve liked to have been able to make a prototype of the mini game. If I was a better programmer, that would’ve happened! Jal, let’s make a mini game this week?

SOLUTIONS & SUGGESTIONS

I think following the “developer” example from last week’s presentation would go a long way for resolving issues.

Week 5 – Design, design, design

This week, I helped with clarifying what exactly happens when Mosquito lands on Sleepy. Spoiler: Mosquito goes into a rhythm based mini game, and Sleepy’s controller begins to vibrate.  To check his arms, Sleepy presses a button, then using the thumbsticks, he rotates his arms and smacks Mosquito away. Mosquito can bail before getting smacked, or is hit and sent flying – but not killed. Afterwords, Teslim and I designed the layout for the apt, and made a greybox! Or should I say, GREAT-BOX.

(no, I shouldn’t)

Finally, I documented the measurements for the furniture and design meeting notes.

• Meetings! – Design and general – 2 hours
• Greybox layout! – 3 hours
• Documents! – 1 hour

Little bit of a light week. Next week: Design the blood sucking mini game!

Positive

I love how the game is coming together, especially how art design is revealing cool little ideas such as furniture having fun open areas in them.

Negative

Nothing, really.

Solutions & Suggestions

So long as we keep up the good work, things should turn out very well.

Week 4 – Designing room layouts

Being the only dedicated designer on the design team, my work this week was conceptualizing the game. I wrote this up before, but WordPress deleted my post. So, this is the shortened version:

• Designing level layouts
• Helping define the game
• Balancing the game

POSITIVE

This has been a great, crazy fun, and absurd project to work on so far. So excited to see this to fruition!

NEGATIVE

Things were somewhat aimless before our Tuesday meeting, but everything seems to be on track.

SOLUTIONS & SUGGESTIONS

Keep on truckin!