An overall work account

For Advanced Games Development my main focus was production and lead designer. Though this was somewhat of a new challenge from previous modules, I felt I adapted quickly to the module as a whole and below are additional accounts of the work created by myself as a producer and lead role for the project: Royal Rampage.

The initial outline of the project was created (see earlier blog posts) for Unreal Engine 4 and quickly changed to the Unity Engine at the behest of our only programmer to ease workflow on his part.

Continuing on from previous posts, many iterations of work were continuations from previous weeks. As such, weekly meetings were maintained every wednesday 11:00 - 12:00 to assess our weekly progress.

Each Wednesday we would review a new build of the game (Organized with our programmer - james-) we kept an archive of revisions/builds as a form of version control (See below)

During the meetings I would assembly the team together to discuss additional updates and a brief description of what will be needed for our next weekly progress meeting. As such, Level Designs, Art assets/textures and animations were all discussed and given a (loose) deadline to allow implementation for the next build update.

Additionally I would individually talk to each member of the team to see how their assigned task was progressing, I've previously mentioned the tracking of tasks via trello, but I  make sure that each team member has updated their progress on trello to and uploaded their work to the assigned folder on our server (google drive) 

Google Drive Source Folder

Trello For Team Members Assigned Tasks

With the simple assigned tasks and easily visible lists for team members via trello, and small project schedule was created via Microsoft Project To keep tabs on milestones and set deadlines. This was not maintained as actively due to the work load being relatively lax for each member and the weekly meetings being informative enough for the team to know their tasks for the next weekly progress review:

Microsoft Project Schedule

Creating the schedule was some what time consuming, mainly due to inputting every single task for each member, assigning time taken and factoring in other existing modules to combat deadlines and milestones. The image above is just a short snippet of the schedule, each task section on the left has multiple drop down menus detailing additional tasks that are likely to be completed by a set member of the team.

Level Design was a small area to be working on as my main role of lead, however, It was still a pivotal role and learning a new piece of software proved challenging during the stage of other modules and learning project management from scratch. 

The level was created from a simple whitebox as previously showcased, a few work in progress images will showcase how the level was built up: 

Initial Whitebox mockup and reference

Whitebox in Unity Engine with assets from team (Placeholder)

After creating the whitebox, the rest of the level was simple implementation of prefabs created by the art team. To achieve a small variety, many objects were rotated, duplicated and scattered throughout the level to create disparity and add a small level of narrative/immersion into the sections.

Scripted events were another key area of each level. Keeping constant communication with the programmer and the other designer meant work for the scripted events and enemies would need to be implemented at some point. I let the other designer have a free reign on his own level for easement purposes, as such, my scripted events were simple enough for a "tutorial" level - Keeping the standardized dungeon crawler theme in mind, chest opening and timer based enemy kills were a simple yet effective event to be implemented.

Additionally, to help the programmer with level flow and pacing, A simple mock up was created for enemy locations and events: 

Top Down View of the level in engine

Top Down View of the level in engine with legend

The UI element of the game was to be kept minimal for the most part, though this was created by Cory, I had the design input and created a mock up for him to add GUI visual elements. A simple mock up and in game screenshot were created in conjunction with our regular meetings:

initial GUI element mock up

From the initial setup, the GUI had changed drastically, designing a simple talent tree system, inventory, bag slot and ability systems was difficult to achieve with a small time from and this style of game. As such, the final design received many transformations from the mock up for the easement of the artists and the simplicity factor for players.

Final In Game Render

Though the work load may seem sparse from a leads perspective, a lot of management and organization went into the project. The weekly meetings were extremely helpful and most of the work/note were paper based and reminders of communication between different team members. Due to the teams extraordinary capabilities and understanding of their respective field, they were able to complete each task assigned to them in these meetings without much additional input from myself.

Due to the small team size and product style, the game was designed with that in mind, ease of use, and small scope - As many of our team members are well skilled, additional modules were a huge factor, as well as ExpoTees which nearly all of our team were admitted in to, others received jobs before the module ended which drastically changed the final outcome of the project. Whilst we were keeping the scope small in comparison to other teams, having only 1 programmer and 1 animator meant that the game would suffer from a design point of view regardless of how skilled our team was as a group and individually.

A large focus of the work load was simple documentation and tasks allocation, as well as bug reporting and small tweaks to the weekly builds. I created a bug template for use by the team when testing the game, though due to huge time constraints we did not have time to fully test the game and fix these issues:

Bug Testing Template

Completed Bug Template