During the first few weeks the team
The team began diverting into their own route unsure what the other has done which led to me and others unsure of what to do.
We as a group struggled to communicate and create objectives and date times so I took it upon myself to ‘take charge’ of the situation and allocate weekly sprints for our group and create “instructions” for them to follow.
Feeling the need to manage the project and balance my work as a level designer proved giving ideas felt the lack of communication of additional ideas or them not communicating proved difficult to track what each individual is doing which sometimes made it feel like communicating with a brick wall, where they would listen and attempt to do the sprint I’ve given them from their understanding instead of working together to figure an interesting common shared vision in the game, which caused problems in them finding motivation heavily relying on me tasking them what they should add and difficulty in knowing what they were doing and who is using the GitHub, and limit the group’s creativity.
We as a group faced repeated communication barriers especially with our team’s mechanics and coder Sam. Having both different visions for the game and final outcome and finding it hard to communicate what each of us feel like it’s important to add in the game proved difficult and in times even put us far behind schedule. Finding a time to make meetings also proved challenging due to living in different cities and having only discord to communicate our ideas. I felt the pressure of heavily relying on Sam to understand where he wants the game to go and what he wants to include due to the character abilities differing in our mind. Which proved difficult to create puzzles revolved around. The pressure of being unsure what the other is doing led to the feeling of demotivation and slow progression, we could rarely meet due to cancellations from both sides and the different environment each of us are used to work in, Sam preferring to talk through discord and work in his home city while I rather communicate in person and work with Sam in the moment to resolve issues.
Trying to resolve this proved at first challenging we would meetup every week or so and write what we intend to do by the end of the week or ask the other individual to write what they understood. Also our
Meetings with Sophie
Sam was very keen with implementing his own ideas but found it challenging to make his vision clear and with me overloading Sam with tasks to do which made him feel overly stressed about the project led to led to us organising meetings with Sophie.
The solution was to continue to aim to communicate and give one another clear and short bullet point instructions of what needs to be completed in the next week.
Over the next few communication between me and Sam had drastically improved and over the player feedback of our game’s responses led to more work and understanding the intention and work we each need to do.
Sophie recommended for Sam to view a video to help align my vision of how the mechanic could work:
After the meetings with Sophie
Me and Sam exchanged messages through Discord more consistently in a bullet point form, to communicate what each of us are looking for that the game should include, so I could create puzzles and level around and Sam could make the mechanics happen.
Other communication with additional team members
Environmental artist -The communication exchange between me and the environmental artist, Carter, proved simple having asking him to perform broad tasks like to create assets for the roads, add a fun area at the start of the level and help me improve the foreground of the level, which he added his own unique spin to.
Character artist- My over focus on having good mechanics of the game proved challenging with handing weekly sprints for Esi as I wasn’t sure other than what the GDD says what should be added.
After the play-test I asked Esi for help to create according to the player feedback.
Esi
- Create a tutorial level in hub world
- Help create the UI
- Create a winning condition end goal that takes them back to the hub world.
Week 11 prototype
Github issues, while working a day before the prototype the lack of mention of who is working on the project led to my work being overwritten and the play-through was incomplete and an edited older version of the scene was used and edited.
Reverting the changes
Problems with reverting back the changes happened on GitHub where I needed to create an additional brunch which caused changes to be deleted.
Overall, having to rise up and help our team to communicate and progress through the game development process proved useful as without it I believe there could not be a playable game. This taught me the importance of communication and understanding what your team needs to do, keeping track of time also proved essential in our decision making as well as handing weekly sprints. Overall, the communication between our team members did improve after playtesting as getting the feedback of others proved useful and helped shape our game how it is, which I believe is a very fun platforming game.
In the future- I hope to resolve the issue early on and putting more of my time trying to understand the other group members vision before planning my own, setting more frequent deadlines for my team and hopefully splitting the roles with others would have made it easier and given me more time to work on creating a more ambitious level.