Atlantic Adventures
Project Details
- Team size: 4
- Genre: Adventure, Turn-Based Combat, Exploration
- Engine: Custom
- Duration: 14 weeks
Role: Producer
- Ensuring team members shows up to meeting on time.
- Ensuring team members accomplishes tasks on time
- Ensuring the mental health of team members by checking in weekly to ensure workload is manageable, and to prevent burnout.
- Assigning tasks to team members using SCRUM management.
- Leading the team to ensure all milestone goals are met.
- Used Agile methodologies to plan out tasks for upcoming milestones.
- Assisted with basic game engine architecture.
- Assisted with game logic programming.
Production Achievements / Challenges:
- One of the biggest challenge on this project was actually the fact that we were a team of 4 computer science students, thus, while juggling all the programming aspects of the game, we also needed to ensure that we had a certain quality in our art in order to make the game playable.
- One of the my failures and key-takeaway from this project was that communication is a very important aspect of creating a successful project. I had many issues with communication in this project with members of the team, and as a greenhorn Producer, I had yet to learn the importance of keeping up with the various tasks of the team members. Thus, when one of my members fell behind in their tasks, I noticed it too late, and this led to our game not being a fun one. However, I also learnt that when push comes to shove, as long as the team is united, we will be able to push the product out the door, and through this project, my team and I understood the importance of clear and concise communication.
Project Timeline
Gold Milestone
Ultimately, for the gold submission, we managed to have our game working, with the previous mentioned features all within the game.
We polished the game to add more feedback to make the overall experience less frustrating for our players, but ultimately, the game still felt like it was too rushed and was ultimately a failure in terms of being a fun game.
However, I’m still grateful to my team for being able to stick through the tough times, and push through in order to make this game work. Without their hard work, we never would have been able to push this product out, in a working condition.
Beta Milestone
For the beta submission, it was necessary for our game to be feature complete; thus, we managed to rush out the necessary features for this stage.
Gameplay at this stage includes:
- Overworld ship exploration
- Island hero exploration
- Combat (both within the Island and on the Seas)
- Boss battle
It was shortly after the milestone was over that my Designer communicated to me that he was actually bone-dry on design ideas, and that he’s fresh out of ideas for what we need to do in order to make the game fun.
At this point in time, the game was lacking in terms of the fun factor, as there was simply too many things to do for such a small game. Thus, after holding a group meeting, we decided to eschew all forms of feedback to try and make the game fun, as we believed that to be impossible to achieve with our current time and scope.
Instead, we focused all our efforts on the more technical aspects of the game by adding more fancy particles, and also adding in enough content that can allow our game to get past the module.
Alpha Milestone
For our alpha, we managed to achieve 50% of the gameplay we wanted within the game.
As you can see from the pictures above, we already had some of the core concepts of the game implemented, and were working steadily towards beta.
One of the challenges I faced during this time, but which I failed to notice, was the lack of progress on the game design side.
