With the semester coming to a close here at Champlain College there is very little time left to make progress on Lucha Megadrive. It has been a long and intense semester for the team. Taking a few weeks off for the winter holidays will help us recharge, spend time with our families– and probably still work on Lucha Megadrive here and there because we all love working on it so much! Most of us already have some research work planned out for during the holidays– nothing super intense, but could save a lot of time at the start of the semester. We already put together a rough project charter:

2 Fully Animated Characters
1 Super Awesome Environment (2-3 Max)
Updated Music
Updated UI / Menus
Button Remapping in Character Select
Tutorial
Additional Rope Play Systems
Training Mode
- "Virtual Gym" with ropes and crowd
- Floors and Walls need lines for players to learn spacing and frame data
- Basic AI (3D Bepis)

We put together this list of high level goals now so that if any of us want to work on something over the holidays we know what we can be working towards and research the viability of these different features. At the start of next semester, we will then take these charter items and prioritize them to create our new product backlog. We will then take those product backlog items and spread them across the weeks we have laid out for next semester:

As you can see, the first 8 weeks of the semester we have a nice big chunck to get things done. Once spring break hits, development is probably going to feel slower and segmented due us attending GDC, PAX, and the Champlain College Senior Show at the end of the semester. It is going to be tricky to plan out and execute all these different features we want to add in addition to finishing our last semester of college and applying for jobs. We are up for the challenge! And that is why we started putting together our plan right away!

Post Mortem

Switching gears from thinking about the future– it is time to reflect on this past semester working on Lucha Megadrive.

As a game developer, where am I now?

I have grown an enormous amount as a developer this semester. My previous years here at Champlain College have all felt like practice or “play house” for game development. This semester I felt like I couldn’t just plop this project in model plans that I’ve learn in my courses. I felt challenged as a planner and organizer to make sure everyone was firing on all cylinders so that we get the features we needed to communicate our game idea. I created business documents, budgets, competitive reviews, market analyses, culture analyses, rational documents, sprint report slide shows, a ton of spreadsheets for sprint planning, our awesome trailer, and this portfolio website / development blog: all of which I’m extremely proud of. I also became Scum Product Owner certified this semester– which now that I’m looking back on it, I think that course really help me to guide the vision of Lucha Megadrive and make sure we were prioritizing the right features. This semester was all about application of everything I’ve learned over the past couple of years. For a while I’ve felt ready to go into the game industry– now even more so then ever!

What did I do? What does it mean? As a team member, what did I bring to this team?

I managed and lead the team through a lot this semester. At the beginning of our project we faced a lot of hesitation and disbelief from both our peers and the faculty on the viability of making a fighting game. But we were smart about our development and distilled down the essence / what exactly makes a fighting game: the gameplay, feedback/feel, and animations. Everything we did was focused towards making the game feel good and fun to play. We were able to accomplish this because of our extensive research, documentation, and communication with each other. We kept refining our vision and making sure that we were all on the same page. This is my job as a game producer to make sure the project is developed in a smart way and is delivered on time. Not every feature we wanted to work on or started made it in this semester, but the most important ones did. Overall, I brought organization, plans for the future, documentation, presentation skills, and snacks.

What went well? What could have been better?

Our gameplay is definitely the star of our show (also the actual show we put on for the studio was a big hit too). Our main character Jonny Fuego had 56 different moves all with their own frame data and animations. We had to figure out how to create our own fighting game systems in Unity. Unlike other game genres like FPS, fighting games aren’t being made that much outside of a few large companies. There weren’t very many online references– we had to figure out a lot of how to make the game on our own (Champlain faculty were actually a huge help in this regard).

So yay we made a fighting game, but we spent a lot of time / about the first half of the semester figuring out how to do that. One of the big challenges we faced was how to do the animations. Originally, we were thinking about creating 2D sprites because both of our original artist specialize in 2D art. But it turned out, even with there expertise and speed in 2D, it was simply faster and easier to pump out all the animations we needed in 3D. Because of this though, the quality of our art ended up not being where we wanted it to be. Both of our artist had to figure out how to even operate in 3D let a lone how to express their styles and the world we came up with. Because of this, anything that wasn’t our main character didn’t receive much art attention. The environment, UI, menus, and even the art document all weren’t given the time and attention they needed because making our main character look and feel good was our number one priority. This lack of attention also affected our team dynamic. The rest of the team knew the artist were in for a ton of work with this project and the change from 2D to 3D definitely shook them up outside their expertise / comfort zones. We eventually recognized that the rest of the team didn’t feel they could fully critique the art because of these factors. In the end, we talked it all out and agreed upon plans for giving and receiving feedback. It is one of those things that maybe started out small, but grew to greatly affect how our art turned out. With that all being said, we did agree that the art we created was good for a Champlain College capstone project, but it wasn’t the portfolio quality work we wanted.

What would you do different if you had to do it again? What could you personally have done to help make the game and development process better?

By the end of the project I think I did a very good job at leading the development process of Lucha Megadrive– the beginning though was really rough for me. We had to create 3 different prototypes at the same time and it is extremely hard to plan and dive into 3 different games at once. We knew we wanted to make a fighting game, but we weren’t brave enough to make 3 fighting game prototypes each testing different mechanics. If I could go back, I would definitely push the team to do that– I think it probably would have given us another 2 weeks working on Lucha Megadrive, and we would have figured out the art issues sooner.

Speaking of the art issues, I should have noticed that the team didn’t feel comfortable critiquing the art. I too fell into the trap and created excuses for why I shouldn’t say my critiques of the art. It wasn’t a huge problem, but when the issue came to the surface one of our artist felt personally hurt that we didn’t feel we could give them critique. We worked it out in the end, but I would have wanted it to have been worked out sooner both for the sake of our art and our artists. I feel responsible for this issue and that is why we now have the team agreement for how we each like to give and receive feedback so that a problem like this is less likely to occur in the future.

What did I learn from working with this specific group of people?

I learned how true it is that fighting games are hard to make, but I also learned that our team kicks ass and we figured out how to do it anyways. I know a lot more about the technical requirements and research that goes into art development. I have a much better understanding of art pipelines and how to work with artist to get time estimates for planning. From our programmer I relearned the importance of creating tools early. Because we decided to focus on our gameplay systems and develop tools for those systems, our designer was able to rapidly and easily tune the feel of the game. From our designer, I learned new ways to present our game concept, what makes people excited about games, and the huge amount of math that goes into systems design, i.e. every move/action is a number– if not multiple numbers that result in the game feeling good (I also learned some acting skills from our designer). Without both our programmer and our designer being fighting game aficionados this game would have sank. It takes years of experience with a genre to know how to create it properly, and our programmer and designer backed up their experience with extensive research and hundreds of hours of hard work. Which leads me to the overall take away I got from this team and project: articulated by our designer, “game development is 70% planning 30% in engine”. Most of our hours logged are team meetings, faculty meetings, research, documentation, and QA. We all grew a lot as planners, and we learned so much from research and faculty meetings– getting information from someone else who has been there done that is extremely beneficial. We are very grateful for all the guidance we’ve received these past couple of months.

What will I bring to a team moving forward?

There is a lot to do moving forward and our team size just doubled. Now more so than ever, I need to bring organization, plans, documents, and snacks. As you saw at the start of this post, we have already began planning out next semester. I need to be a communication point and the clarifying voice of our vision. This won’t be my first time working with a ten person team, and I have learned a lot about how important a vision with a plan is for a bigger group. Communication is going to be the key to success next semester and will determine wether or not our vision is actualized. I’m approaching next semester with a calm mind, excitement, and great anticipation for what we end up making.