liamsgames

At the beginning of this project I thought I knew how much work it would take. But, unsurprisingly, I was grossly underestimating the amount of work it takes to make a game. Even a small one. I was incredibly lucky to end up with the team I did, we all got along straight away and there was no butting heads or “my idea is better than yours” kind of attitudes. Just a bunch of guys that were really excited to make a game.

After the first couple of weeks in pre-alpha I still had grandiose ideas of how smooth it would all go and how easy the next couple of months would be. My role as producer on the team had me scoping out the entire project. Converting all scripts and art assets I thought we’d need into trello cards, attaching hour amounts of how long I thought they would take. When the first week of alpha started and production began I was confident that we would have over half the time given to us left to polish a finished game. Oh boy, was I wrong...

The team was still bursting at the seams with excitement, there was lots of laughter and goofing around and we’d all go for drinks every Wednesday. The daily scrums weren’t as “business meeting” as I had intended, we would all just swing our chairs around have a brief chat, then I would dole out trello cards and we’d get to work. The first scripts and meshes were getting ticked off really quickly, to the point that I thought we’d have to scope up in order to keep the artists and programmers busy.  The burndown chart was showing we had finished over 80 hours of work in the first couple of days, and I wasted no time in telling the team how awesome they all were and how we had this project in the bag.

Presentation time and although we didn’t get torn apart like some of the other teams in our presentation group, the feedback was that we needed some major changes to our movement. Given that our main mechanic was in fact moving, it needed to be the most refined. So that’s when one of our programmers was put specifically on refining movement - for the rest of the project that’s what he did. Other feedback was that we needed to shrink the size of the arena. During the industry presentation we set up a prototype build of the game and had some of the industry guys fly around our greyboxed level - the response wasn’t good.  They we’re unable to find each other and one of the players glitched out completely after trying out our barrel roll. After this the team’s previous arrogance towards game development was all but gone. We knew we had a lot of work to do.

During beta the team was a different sight, the laughing and goofing around had been replaced by exasperated sighs, and the weekly drinks had long been forgotten. The trello cards were falling slower, many of them had to be reworked or removed completely as time was becoming more and more of a threat. Problems started popping up whenever we would try to test a build, and without being able to test, we were unable to iterate on our design. The mood was dropping and stress levels were rising.

Enter gold and all the contingency time I scoped in was all but gone. Where I thought we would be polishing a working game, we were still trying to get a build to work and fix this bug that had been plaguing us from the moment we plugged in two controllers. So much time was spent trying to track it down and find out what was causing it, but all endeavors were fruitless. It wasn’t until the final week of production that we found it had nothing to do with our code, but was just a matter of plugging the controllers in slowly and one at a time (are you freakin’ kidding me?!). It was a race against the clock at the end, but I am so proud of our buggy little baby.

Particle Party!

As the end of beta draws ever closer the stress is mounting. We just had to cut some art assets out of the game, which is never easy. The whole team had a vision about how the game would look, and we’ve worked our asses off trying to get as close to that vision as possible. But... shit happens. Some things that we thought would be easy ended up eating into schedule in ways we would never have predicted. We clung onto these extra assets as long as we could but, alas, the time has come to say goodbye. 

On a lighter note: it feels really surreal and awesome to see your name on the credits of something. 

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Jack and I mocked up a budget today, and it kind of killed our dreams. 

The exercise was to work out what it would cost to start a studio and continue working on our game in the event that AIE was closed down. Costs stack up fast, even with a relatively small team. Licencing an engine, Maya and Photoshop is a pretty big chunk already. Then factoring in release costs over 3 platforms, cloud storage, all necessary hardware and artists tools, outsourcing costs for QA and Audio design... the list goes on and on. And the rent, THE RENT. 

Okay, beta time. I was feeling good about the progress we made through the alpha stages, but the stress is setting in again. Over 100 hours were added to our beta scope, so the deadlines look a little scarier this week. I have faith in my team, we all want to see this game made - and made well. 

I feel an end-of-year crunch coming, I hope we’re ready.

Burn, Baby. Burn.

Alpha is drawing to a close and, although the graph doesn’t show it, we’re on schedule. I even had to move some Trello cards over from the beta board to keep the team busy over the next 2 days. I’m actually over the moon with how much work we’re getting done because it means we get to scope up! We’ve got a couple of meetings today and tomorrow to discuss the best approach to workflow, but it should be all gravy. 

We’re hoping to add another arena with the extra time. Something a little smaller and suitable for a 1v1 match.

We’re about to hit the last week of alpha and the game is progressing really nicely. A few gamepad problems with Unity are eating up some time, but we scoped for this, so we’re still on schedule.

Can’t wait to start testing this bad boy. I’m really interested to see how the gameplay goes down and what strategies emerge.  

It’s amazing what a shit-ton of planning and a couple of days can do. 

A couple of work days into the alpha build and we’re already flying about shooting the place up. It’s brilliant. (note: The split-screen is filled mainly with placeholder cameras for when we implement multiplayer. We need to make sure the level is readable to the player even when they’re playing on a quarter of a screen.)