Sprint 13: We Made The Cut!

Our presentation last week was a big hit! (Check it out at this link, I’ll be editing together a subtitled version with different camera angles over the next couple of weeks). In addition to the studio wides pitches, each team also needed to demo their game for the faculty members. When we demoed our game to Champlain College faculty most of them were able to pick it up pretty easily and start having a good time right away. We were given 1 hour to guide faculty members as they played our game and after all the games made this semester were played, the faculty locked themselves in a classroom for 2.5 hours and determined which teams should move on to next semester. Meanwhile, us students were hanging out in Champlain College’s gallery space– maybe a 15 second walk away from the classroom– waiting with great anticipation and wondering which of us were going to make the cut. Much of the time was spent congratulating each other on our hard work and wishing each other good luck. The nerves were high all around, but eventually the faculty made their decisions and came out to the gallery with a used napkin that listed the 11 games that were to move on to next semester. As each game was announced, hearts dropped, tears were shed, and cheers and congratulations were exchanged. After some closing statements from the faculty negotiations broke out. This semester started with 23 teams– meaning 12 of them got cut. At an average team size of 4, that meant that about 48 people were looking to join the remaining projects. Of course, many of us planned ahead and had already talked too who we wanted to team up with. But not everyone had made their final decisions and many free agents roamed. After a busy 30 minutes of negotiations most people had a rough idea of who was going to join who.

Later, a spreadsheet was created to better keep track of who was joining which team and to make sure the remaining teams got the developers they needed for production. Here is what our team has been looking for:

Top Priority:

Animators
Environment Artist
Graphics Programmer

Nice to Have:

Systems Programmer
UI and Sound Designers

Based on the number of people available, each team is expected to grow to an average of 9 from the original average of 4. Our team was already slightly above the original average with 5 people: 1 producer, 1 designer, 2 artists, and 1 programmer. It is expected that each of us are to become the leads of our discipline and help the joining team members in our crafts learn our pipelines.

In terms of who we have lined up to join our team, we have: 2 animators, 1 environment artist, 1 UI designer, 1 graphics programmer, and 1 systems programmer. All of them are excited about working on Lucha Megadrive and we have worked with a few of them before so we know they are good developers. Later today we have a meeting with these prospective team members to get a feel for everyone’s intentions and a taste of the possible team dynamic. Here is the agenda for that meeting:

Overview roles / skills
Current opinion or vision of the game
Ideas for characters and stages
Expectations for this project, team, yourself
What are your goals for after graduation? (Are you interested in going indie?)
What title do you want? / What level of involvement do you want?
How do you like to receive feedback?

Go Over Logistics

Discord for communication
Google Drive for documentation
HG Repo and Unity Collab for development
Figure out meeting times and places

After this meeting we should have a clear idea of why each of these incoming developers want to work on Lucha Megadrive while also inviting them to start getting engaged with our development methods.

But there is one more hurdle we have to go through to be set for this semester. Tomorrow evening is the final team draft where the remaining teams prepose to the faculty which developers they plan to bring onto their teams and why. The faculty have the final say in who goes where. The faculty are trying to insure that each team gets the developers they need and that these free agent developers are being spread relatively evenly throughout the studio so that no one team is hogging all the developers. This is where things get a little tricky. While most of our potential team members have listed Lucha Megadrive as their first choice for the game they want to work on, the faculty might decide that their skills are more needed on a different game. We have other people in mind in case of this, but where a decision like this could really hurt is animation. In our year, there are very few artist who have skills in animation and only 2 of them officially declared it has their specialization. And those 2 animators are the same 2 animators that want to work on our game. We would love for both of these animators to join Lucha Megadrive because animation is a huge part of making a fighting game feel good. But it is unlikely we will get both of them because there are other teams/games that need animators too. We still plan to argue for the need of both of them and we have been told that we will probably get at least one of them. It is an unfortunate situation. There is a chance we can get both of them and develop a robust roster of characters next semester, but we are also prepared to only bring on one animator and focus in on only a few playable characters.

That’s it for this week. Next time, I’ll recap the results of the draft and share more details about our plans for next semester.