Week 2

Guest Speaker

This week’s speaker was Paul MacGillivray who has nearly 20 years of experience in the games industry specifically in production and QA. He outlined to us the roles and responsibilities of a producer in the games industry and how important a producer really is for a game’s success. He explained how a producer’s role is to guide the production pipeline of a game to ensure goals are met and delivered, the producer goes about doing so by carefully scoping the game and deciding what does and doesn’t get made.

Task

To get us to understand how a producer’s job works he gave us the example of cooking a dish and made us plan how we’d make a dish as efficiently as possible within a specific allotted amount of time.

We thought about how long it would take to make pesto pasta and chicken and how long each part would reasonably take. At first we took about half an hour to finish the dish but then Paul encouraged us to try to reduce the time. We were able to reduce it to 20 minutes by doing multiple tasks at once and then again to about 10 minutes by removing the chicken from the dish. Though making food and making games are entirely different ventures this exercise gave us a good idea of how to plan and scope games efficiently. If you want to make a game within a specific amount of time it requires careful planning as well as potentially cutting some intended content. Money and time are finite when it comes to game production, as such a competent producer is important to have when making a game in order to manage those two fundamental aspects.

Thursday Lesson

On this day we had a lesson on user demographics and crisis management. Sophie has us think about user stories and what a player wants out of a game. She also gave us some examples of how under difficult circumstances she was still able to deliver a game and do her job which was inspiring to me. I took notes during the lesson:

User Stories

When we empathize from the POV of a user to know what they want from the game experience.

• Foundation of everything you make as a designer.
• When designing systems in a game, you need to link it back to the experience the player wants.
• Always important to understand the user’s POV
• Make sure to play with your player rather than making a boring piece of art.
  Takeaways
• Empathy and attention to detail are how we take our games from amateur to professional
• Things take time.

As a player, I want to defeat the stages of grief so that I can feel a sense of accomplishment.

As a 14-26 year old human being, I want to experience the phases of grief in a manner that allows me to conquer them so that I can feel accomplished.

As a player, I want to conquer enemies and bosses so that I may be satisfied.

Crisis Project Management

• No extensions when money is involved
• Crisis can be small personal things that affect your work productivity, (moving houses, breaking a bone, etc.)
• Work can still be done under difficult circumstances.
• Important: make it look like you have more than you do.
• Write down all risks to know how much work you can assuredly do.
• Prioritize finishing a game over including everything you planned.

Project Work

During this week I began work on the gate of depression. Since our vertical slice was to contain the hub world with an emphasis on the realm of depression I felt that it was appropriate to work on the entrance to the realm. Since we were still thinking of the size of the game’s camera and how much of the screen was visible the integral aspect of tile sets was to be made later on when myself and the group had made a firm decision on how the actual gameplay would look (i.e. screen size, the perspective, etc.). As a result I began working on the gate of depression, doing this would allow us to have an idea of the level of detail we should have for the game and inform the art style and colour palette of the depression realm.

By the end of the week I had an early version of the depression gate. The full process can be accessed on the gate design section (embed link here). I also created a rough draft of the protagonist for scale and to make a rendition of what the perspective of the game would be, so it wouldn’t be perfectly top down but would have maybe a slight angle to be able to fully show the designs of characters and walls.

Reflection

Overall this week gave us a better impression of how to scope our games and how to plan out our tasks more efficiently. I was pleased with the design I came up with for the gate to the depression realm and I believe my group mates were also satisfied with the design I made.