Week 1: Oh, Rats!
MONDAY:
Our first lecture was focused on what we’d be doing, and the teamwork and the roles we’d play within it. It was an important way to set the tone of the course, since all of our work this semester will be completed as a team.
What is a Vertical Slice?
A vertical slice is the most minimum viable product you can create to pitch to publishers. It is the game in its alpha stage, a build that can be played in one sitting with end to end functionality. A vertical slice MUST back the design principles of the GDD with a clear and playable demonstration that delivers those promises. This is what we will be creating over the course of the next semester.
What is Agile Development?
Within our teams, our tutor stressed the importance of teamwork. We will be practicing “agile development” – in which all members of the team are consistently working on an aspect of the game, as opposed to “waterfall development” where team members pass down the project like an assembly line. Agile development leaves room for more flexibility and leads to less delays.
To encourage us to confront our worries, we wrote what most concerned us on sticky notes and put them on a scale of “impact” and “probability”. This way we all understood each other, and discovered we had many concerns in common!
Bubble Bros.
To get a feel for the teams we would build, our tutor suggested we play some games in the next room. Handily that weekend a bunch of us had finished participating in the Global Game Jam, and spent a couple hours playing through each other’s games – the highlight of which was “Bubble Bros.”, a competitive multiplayer game where one person tries to clean, and the other cover everything in mud. It was an enjoyable experience where we got to find the fun and flaws in our games, and I hoped to be partnered with anyone in that room.
THURSDAY:
By Thursday afternoon we’d also taken a vote to find out what games and teams we would be working in. Previously I’d put down that I wanted to work on Esi’s game “Oh, Rats!”, with the job of 3D design. Much to my delight, I got exactly what I wanted!
Unfortunately not all my teammates felt the same way. Jize had never worked with mechanics before, Hugo was hoping to do some 3D modelling of his own, and Ziyi wasn’t here to advocate for herself (though guessing by her website we assumed her talents lay in 2D art). With a little reshuffling, we were able to come up with some new delegations that seemed to fit everyone better.
Our tutor also stressed the importance of breaking down our project into manageable chunks of tasks, so we began to divide and delegate.
After laying it all out, the enormity of the task we now faced stretched before us. We realised we were going to have to make some necessary cuts. Even a vertical slice of this game was a massive undertaking. And despite the fact we didn’t want to corner ourselves into “waterfall development”, many of the tasks couldn’t get done until someone had finished a previous one.