Sprint 14: The “Draft”

This past week has been a long one. Many late nights have been had despite the project being done for the semester. Much debate has been going through the game studio regarding the process and result of “drafting” the now free agent developers onto new teams. For those not in the know, 11 out of 24 teams this semester were chosen to continue development on their prototyped game ideas and our game Lucha Megadrive was one of those surviving projects. This process of prototyping and cutting game ideas is modeled after Nintendo’s “find the fun” methodology and is a standard process every year here at Champlain College’s The Game Studio. What also happens each year is drama around who should join which teams based on team dynamic, skills needed for the project, and overall talent available for the year. Last week, I listed out the roles we were looking for:

2 Animators
1 Environment Artist
1 Graphics Programmer
1 Systems Programmer
1 UI Designer
1 Sound Designer

After a 3 hour long draft on a Friday night, a weekend of hundreds of messages throughout our cohort about how the draft didn’t go well, and then another 2 hour long meeting on Monday revising the draft… the waters have finally calmed.

We happily announce that we will be bringing onboard:

1 Animator
1 Environment Artist
1 Graphics Programmer
1 Systems Programmer (Part Time / Moonlighting)
1 UX Designer

We got the roles we needed the most and the people we wanted to work with (which is a lot more then a couple of the teams can say about the results of the “draft”). It was a tumultuous time for everyone involved, but our team came out for the better.

With only this week and next left in our semester there isn’t a lot of time to get things done, but our team is still making an effort to make the on-boarding process for our new members smooth and welcoming. In our last meeting together we spent a lot of time sharing why we each wanted to work on the team and how involved we wanted to be. Here was the agenda I put together 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

By the end of this on-boarding meeting it felt like everyone had opened up and that we were all ready to start working together. Our new UX designer even mentioned how “before this meeting I was pretty hesitant about joining this team and to be honest it was my 2nd pick, but that has definitely changed and now you all are my first pick!” It was a fun and energy filled meeting and I’m excited to be working with the new team members!

As for next semester, right now we are looking to tackle a vertical slice 2.0. We want to completely revamp our game’s visuals now that we have our new members. We want to bring the quality of the visuals from “good for a student project” up to a portfolio piece that will nock the socks off of anyone that glances at it. Additionally, we are still going to add 1 more playable character and a training mode. Sadly, we are probably going to drop our ideas for a single player story mode for now since we didn’t get the person power to develop that feature. We are also still looking into creating an arcade cabinet to leave our mark on Champlain College and inspire future students. We have a couple of different routes we can take in terms of producing the cabinet and they all have different costs. We are running through our budgets this week with the goal of deciding a direction before the end of the semester.

Next week I’ll be posting a post mortem for this semester listing out how I think our development went and want I think we need to do to improve it. After that it will be the winter holidays, so there will likely not be another weekly post until sometime in January. The team is thinking about doing a little bit of work over the break, but we also all want to cool down after this long and stressful semester and spend sometime with our families.