The premise is basically that we had one week (16-person team) to develop a game with a set of conditions handed to us, where the most limiting one was that the target audience had to be tweens.
The game we ended up developing was a monster smashing game for boys in that age group. You play as a boy in a monster suit smashing stuff, the more stuff you smashed the bigger you grew and at the end you would be an actual HUGE monster going around smashing whole cities.
The challenge was to keep smashing stuff as your chaosmeter would go down unless you caused chaos. So the game was meant as katamari, except smashing stuff rather than collecting stuff.
Postitives:
- Limits reached. This game was MASSIVE! I think that during this one week the team showed how effective we could work. Considering that we are 16 people working together for the first time, the fact that we attempted to do something of this scale and to a certain extent actually managed something of this size (even though cut down in size, it's still a big game). The game is of course deeply flawed, but the process showed us what the art team is capable of (being only 4 vs. 8 programmers). It also showed us what the programmers can do within UNITY. We were pushing UNITY quite a lot with the massive amounts of destructable buildings in the game.
- Target audience, check! During production we managed to test the game on our target audience (midway through production). The test, although small and containing a very crude version of the game showed us that we were on the right direction. The boys that tested the game were all fairly excited about the premise of being a monster smashing stuff and growing into an even cooler monster. Of course a lot of times kids just get excited about new stuff, however considering the crude nature of our build, it was positive that they still enjoyed running around smashing random stuff.
- My designerly ways. I'm glad I managed not to lose myself as a designer during this production. This is by far the biggest team, I've ever worked in and I'm happy that I managed to design the way that I prefer to design even within a bigger team. Basically I like to design the play before the game and I feel like this game showcases that. It is of course deeply flawed, but I hope the team kind of understands how I work and design now.
Negatives:
- Scope is key! Again it seems like I'm involved in a project going way out of scope. Thinking back on the conceptualisation is a big question mark. How could we ever think that this game would be feasible within the one-week time limit? The ridiculuos amount of props that the art team had to do, the three different character models, each with their sets of animations, massive destructable buildings (that Unity can't quite handle), levels built within each other? What were we thinking? Completely out of scope. So although the whole team was onboard with the concept and excited about it, it could not make up for the fact that this project was just out of scope.
- Design for the format. The game had a condition that said that is had to run in a browser with the keyboard and mouse controls. Even though I knew about this way before conceptualisation I still ended up designing a control scheme (and game) that would have been better suited for a console. One of the main mechanics of swiping in different directions (in order to smash) would have been much better suited to a double analog stick control scheme. This was meant as a PC browser but was designed as a console executable. This is completely on my shoulders as a designer and for next time I will definately keep in mind to design for the format and use the affordances and constraints that come along with it.
- Where is plan B? This again links very closely to the out-of-scope problem. First of all, we should have seen that it was out of scope sooner than we did. Second of all we should have had a plan b (or a cut-down plan) so that we could scale the game down if needed. Instead we saw the problem and kept on going. This is a team reflection however personally I know that I have problems killing my darlings, which I should probably try to deal with, e.g. the console controls of this game was something I should have dealt with instead of just leaving it there, because I thought "this would be good on a console". Well we weren't designing a console game, so I should have dealt with it.
All in all, this game was more of a learning experience than a make a great game experience. However it was a HUGE learning experience and although the game that came out at the other end wasn't good, I think it had/have potential to be really good. I think we managed to do a lot during a one week production and can only imagine that whatever we make for the big production later in the semester will be awe-inspiring. In the meantime you can go play Smash-o-Saurus.
