So studio 3 is coming to an end and as such our garden project, which we dubbed ‘Project Sapling’, has been completed and handed off to the client. This was a different taste of game development and a very interesting one at that.
For those who are unaware of this project, I was part of a team of 4 game designers who were tasked with making an Augmented Reality game about school gardening. This is a serious game with a focus on education and helping students retain memories they obtain in class time by testing their memory through quizzes and mini games. We had 12 weeks to work on the project and had the help of 4 game programmers and I think it’s safe to say that we are all pretty pleased with the outcome. If you want to read up on the stuff that I have been doing throughout this trimester, go check out my Studio 3 blog category.
Teamwork & Flexibility
One major standout from this trimester was the team dynamics. We gained really good momentum from the beginning and aside from the small bumps that should be expected from any new team, we hit it off right from the start. We were consistently showing up outside of class time to do team work and sometimes even field research. I have some blogs about field research that you can read up on my previously mentioned Studio 3 blog category. This really showed me that our team was committed to the project and was trying to make it the best it could be.
Whenever we found ourselves in a scary situation we were all able to talk to each other and ensure that we didn’t get too distant from the project or each other. There were many unknowns and blockers that we faced throughout the project but we always managed to stay level headed and work it out as a team. As very like minded members we were able to come to compromises by being aware of and trusting in each others strengths. Especially in some of our earlier client meetings when we kept needing to revise our design due to a lack of direction.
Direction
Going into this project fairly blind and needing to prepare for any direction was difficult. This was due to the lack of information gained for the project before we started brainstorming, researching the potential clients and looking into similar games. After our first client meeting we had to change how we were looking at the project, but getting a form of direction was a massive relief. We thought that this would be the scariest part of the project because of how lost we were. Little did we know that the rest of the project would have very little direction. Due to the ambiguity of the earlier client meetings and some misunderstandings on our part, we were not really hitting the right spot in our initial design.
In the first meeting we were told this would be an AR game, but we later found out that we would not be dealing with any AR elements. When we tried to design the account login, creation and storing of account data, we were told that we would not be implementing that. At this point it was really confusing for us and we weren’t sure what direction we were meant to be taking. It wasn’t until our second meeting that we found out the nature of our project. Our project would be used as a demo by our client to gain customers. This meant that we only needed to make it look like it works rather than implementing the difficult features such as augmented reality and account creation/storing.
Project Planning
This was my first time taking the project management role, I had previously helped out with a similar role due to some issues with the project, so I was confident I could take on the role for an entire trimester. My early understanding of project management was a bit off because in previous projects we would only ever have a project manager role and no leader role. Because of this many of us assume that the project manager role is inclusive of the project lead role. This was definitely the case for this project where I was mainly focused on short term planning rather than setting out an overall plan with milestones and such for the entire trimester. This is something that came to bite us in the back for the rest of the trimester especially because of the lack of direction in the first half.
We managed to make do with the flexible team we had and made sure that we were putting work in where it made an impact. Though I think we were focusing on the wrong aspects of the game in the later half of the trimester. We were expected to look at memory retention games and try to apply it to the games subject matter. I have some previous blogs where I do research memory retention games, but when it came to applying what I learnt we didn’t really think it through. Because of this I think that the end product was a bit too broad and not focused into the area that our client had liked.
Testing
When developing games where you don’t have as much creative freedom, feedback is the most important thing that you can get. We’ve always been encouraged to gain feedback when developing games and you’d think that we know that given our previous experience with working with clients. But in this project we seemed to just assume that it would be a end of trimester kind of thing and so we threw it on the backlog. Even if we weren’t going to be testing until the later weeks, we should have made some plans for future testing so we could have made time for it when it was necessary.
With that said we did manage to get a lot of feedback from our client during our meetings and get some internal testing during class time to find the obvious flaws. One of the main problems was the fact that we were testing on PC builds in the prototyping stage and the alpha stage. Being a mobile game, a lot of the user experience is centered around the device and as such we needed to start testing on mobile builds.
Conclusion
To summarize, this trimester is no where near as bad as this post mortem makes it out to be. In fact it was one of the most productive projects I have ever been a part of. A lot of the improvements I have noticed in myself is in my workflow and habits that I have continued to build on. Also because this trimester has been solely focused on a single project, it has been much easier to get close to the project and maintain momentum. It’s been really helpful to me to also make sure that I am working on things in the game that I actually enjoy. During the last half of the project I was struggling to find things to do that I enjoyed, I ended up being tasked with making the alpha version of a mini game. I had so much fun with it and got carried away with making it feel good that it got me involved with the project even more.
Getting a look into the business side of the industry by working with real world clients was a valuable lesson for me. I have always been hesitant about being a game developer in a studio or working with clients because I would prefer to make my own games where I have full creative freedom. But this was the wrong way to be thinking about my career and I was simply avoiding things I didn’t know, more so because it was all ‘suits and business’ stuff. This has given me the confidence to do contract work as opposed to trying to get by as an indie developer or doing solo projects as a hobby.
Caleb Middlebrook 