Semester 2: Post 6

Semester 2: Post 6

I spent last week with my nose down focusing on making the better presentation. I hit what was written on the check list of things that needed to be addressed in the presentation but I didn't sell that we had a plan moving forward. It seems that we really didn't. We were working on something better but I'd been too hands off leaving everything to the leads. People were working in isolation and I didn't want to disturb them in their hole. People have emerged from their holes now though.

We have a plan now. I was afraid to plan. I selected the members of this team because I respect them a lot and I didn't want to shackle them with my incompetent producering. In doing that I was incompetent. I wasn't ready to plan because I was waiting for the designers to produce good, solid documentation and in not making it clear that I wanted that I failed them again. It's not too late to be great but I'd say we've lost at least a week of good work in these weeks of playing it loose.

Semester 2: Post 5

It's been a while since I felt so much like shit. First the Greg LoPiccolo disaster, now the Greenlight debacle it's been a bad couple of weeks. I made a poor presentation for the greenlight, it didn't hit all the points and what's worse I spent a really long time on it. What kind of precedent am I setting for the team if I keep on failing to do my job well. I remember during the presentation seeing the other producer rub his face like my father did whenever I'd bring a report card home. I cannot let the team go on spring break with morale being this low.
There are a few things that could raise morale: The next presentation could be amazing, the playable boss fight could be very fun in the first iteration, I could talk to each individual team member to discover their concerns. I know one member is concerned about the writing and I hadn't heard about that until recently even though the concern has lingered. How can I overhaul the plot without hurting feelings? I need to take a more active role. I've left most of the departments to their own devices but I need to just be over 2 times the producer I was last semester.

Minor concern: bad things started happening after I shaved. Is my team going to associate bare faced Jacob with failure Jacob?

Semester 2: Post 4

Semester 2: Post 4

The meeting with the Harmonix guy went badly. I don't want to talk about it. I learned to overprepare for something that vital.

The time has come to abandon the idea of having all the backend stuff done first. It was a wonderful dream but it's been too long and the blueprints aren't all C++ yet. One of the programmer has moved on to gameplay programming and we'll just fix everything that breaks as we go along.
2 weeks from now we are going to have the boss playable, he might not be great but he'll be playable. 1 week from now we are challenging greenlight. It's been a while since I had to do a powerpoint presentation. I hope Edmar doesn't dislike my presentation style. I know I don't like my presentations but everyone else does. I've been in theater though during this semester so I probably won't choke during the presentation. 

Semester 2: Post 3

Semester 2: Post 3

Finally! Visible progress! New UI! New Lighting! 

I'm always thinking about Dan Shredder,Dan Shredder is my life. My life is finally picking up and becoming exciting again. However, we need to get those greenlight deliverables done soon. Greenlight is ambiguously on the horizon. We need to get that done soon but we also have a meeting with a creative director from Harmonix on Monday so we want to slam as much polish in as quickly as possible.

Semester 2: Post 2

Semester 2: Post 2

I know what we're doing next now. we're making the boss fight before we make level 2. It makes sense since the boss will 100% introduce new mechanics and the pacing of the music will be better planned out. I'm happy about knowing that much since we were rather unfocused until recently.

We will be seeing a lot of new stuff added to the build by post 3 and if not that is cause for alarm. We will hopefully have a new fret board in tomorrow. The assets are done they just need to be implemented.

Semester 2: Post 1

Semester 2: Post 1

Development has finally resumed and it's uncomfortably sluggish. A bigger team has more inertia, it takes longer to get the ball rolling, etc. I'm still feel a twinge in my stomach when I go to bed at night and know that we haven't made any visible changes to the build yet. Programmer have been working on cleaning things up and tools so that when pre-production on level two and new mechanics is done work will happen quickly. I might need to set a milestone limit on the pre-production though because while progress is being made it is slow. Any idea being locked down so that we can add it ti the game would be nice and would be good to keep morale up as well. I'm not super concerned yet but stress is mounting within me. I won't know if I'm mismanaging until later down the line but I definitely know that I'm taking a risk by allowing this much time in pre-production. 

Semester Post Mortem

Semester Post Mortem

* Where did you begin, and where did you end up?

It feels like I was another person when we started this project. I would never have guessed that we were going to make a rhythm game that uses a guitar controller and a dance pad when we started the semester. We actually made plans for the kind of game at the end of junior year. We didn't end up following the plan at all but that's probably for the best.

When we made our plans we were fresh off working on a very asymmetric slow horror game that wasn't particularly fun until the very end. After that we wanted to make something fast and action packed that would be fun to play and to work on. When we had to come up with 20 ideas we came up with 15 solid ideas for games that were fast and action packed. 4 bad ideas and we still needed one more so I suggested a game that is controlled with a guitar hero controller and a dance pad so that we could be done. It was an idea that has been rattling around in the collective conscious for a while so I figured someone had already made a game with that concept. 

Obviously we ended up going with that idea but we never would've if we hadn't prototyped two other concepts and realized that they weren't working out. We were only required to make two prototypes but we took the risk and decided to make three to assure we'd end up working on something we'd enjoy working on. This was a good move since Guitar Dancer was our third choice and would've not been prototyped. 

Deciding what game we were going to work on wasn't easy but once we got started on Dan Shredder I saw buy in from the team that I've never seen before on any team I've worked on. Everyone worked long hours to get the game to where it is today. Thanks to that we now have a very good game early build, an expanded team, and a lot of work ahead of us.

* How did you, in your individual role, contribute to the creative process of the team?

I came up with the idea to use the controllers but I my original vision for the game is nothing like what we have now. That's a good thing. That's not my job for good reasons and I needed the buy in from the team and make it the teams idea, not mine. We had lots of design meetings early on and everyone participated in those fully in order to design the game before we got into full-swing production. I can't remember the specifics of what I contributed but I know I did as did everyone else. I also wrote the majority of the dialogue and made the name because I was qualified to do that and it gave me something to work on during the work meetings. I did a good job with it I think despite the fact that I assigned those tasks to myself for utilitarian reasons.

* Describe an instance (or more, but one will suffice) in which your contribution required you to think deeply about how another member of your team was approaching his or her tasks? That is, describe the understanding about another facet of the game development that you achieved—not merely what another team member asked of you—to complete your task effectively?

I don't really do deep thinking. I'm a pretty shallow person to be completely honest. One night I stayed up with the programmer just to make sure he got his work done. It was entirely self interested but everyone acted like I did something great by staying up to peer pressure him into doing work. We both had the same interests though so he really respected me for just staying in the labs. I guess what I learned from that was that people can appreciate pressure, which is good to know as a manager.

* Why did you make certain key decisions (describe at least three of them) throughout the course of the semester?

1. Why did we make 3 prototypes?
Fear, we were afraid of being committed to a project we didn't enjoy working on. We were just playing it as safe as we could while still being able to meet the challenges.

2. Why did we choose to work on Dan Shredder over the other games?

One of the games wasn't coming together design wise. No one could agree on what the game should be and it was clear that we weren't coming together. The other game was boring compared to Dan Shredder. Dan Shredder we knew would turn heads even if it failed spectacularly.

3. Why didn't we have fixed meeting times late into production?

We were working very well without them and doing the same thing at the same time every week makes it less fun. If things started spiraling out of control I would've held fixed time work meetings.

4. Why is the plot of the game what it is?

We were running late on our milestones so we grabbed the most obvious narrative and ran with it. This is an example of something that could've gone very badly.

* What takeaways do you have from this semester as you head into production mode next semester? Address this question by discussing lessons learned—either through success or failure or something in between—more than technical skills developed.

I feel like I'm an alright producer now. I think this can largely be attributed to not being on a team of leftovers for the first time in my life but people are treating me with respect now so I think other people think I'm a good producer now too. I'd say the biggest reason for that is that I decided to have faith in what I've learned. There is an element of being manipulative to being a producer that I don't like. It was stopping me from doing my job: manipulating people to do their work and communicate. I got over my aversion because I realized that what I'm making people do is what they actually want to do they just need a little nudge to get over the initial inertia.