Pitch development, documentation, and reflection on the module.

Examine and Analyze

Based on the feedback we received from the pitch demo in week 6, we carved out the areas of the pitch deck between different team members. I was going to focus on game mechanics and the comparison between other games. Also included were several new slides relating to the gameplay objectives and a deeper dive into the game mechanics and goals for later stages.

During our review of the assignment deliverables, it became clear that our documentation on pitch development was scattered and uncoordinated and needed significant effort to collate and consolidate. I took on these duties and consolidated all references and media into a single package for delivery.

Looking back at our effectiveness as a team, I decided to self-evaluate our performance as a team using elements of the methodology described by Washburn to evaluate over 150 postmortems (Washburn et al. 2016).

  • Creativity: With two artists on the team, we produced a significant amount of concept art and pixel art for in-game.
  • Innovation: An abundance of ideas were available, and we implemented several in the prototype, including the unified timer/health bar.
  • Feature Creep: We suffered from feature creep on several occasions with the abundance of ideas. Kanode and Haddad discuss that feature creep is often a function of having a weak GDD. A stronger GDD will provide a better foundation for development in future game development. (Kanode and Haddad 2009).
  • Management: The team shared the director role, which was effective in keeping us on target despite the flow of new, and discarded ideas
  • Game Design: During the initial design phases, we believed we had a great concept, but after implementation and testing, the edges are rough, and the reasons for continued play need refinement and testing.
  • Gameplay: Internal and external player interaction was positive, but the game is very shallow. We need to implement the crafting tree to provide more depth and compelling reasons to continue playing.
  • Evolution: Some ideas which initially didn’t feel necessary and were discarded for the MVP turned out to be essential to add depth.
  • Scope: We reduced our scope from initial ideas to resolve issues with a lack of collaborative tools.

Overall I think we performed well as a team and believe that the lack of adoption of a multiple developer workflow caused a ripple effect of setbacks.

Scheduling issues and team member availability caused difficulty with some team members being unfamiliar with working in teams. Petrillo discusses this can often be overcome with better asynchronous workflows and recommends detailed agendas be set in advance (Petrillo et al. 2009).

The team leader sent out regular email updates to keep everyone on track. We needed this due to large amounts of backchannel communications and a general lack of adoption of group channels. MacDaniel and Daer, and Freeman and McNeese discuss these as examples of poor communication within teams. I believe these to be functions of conflict avoidance and introversion, all evident within our group (McDaniel and Daer 2016).

Tensions between individualism in creative practices and the need for a holistic collective vision in game development teams raise interesting questions on the new challenges for distributed creative teams where complex interpersonal and professional social dynamics intertwine. (Freeman and McNeese 2019)

We maintained a playable prototype throughout the sprints despite communication challenges thanks to careful management (Kanode and Haddad 2009).

Learning and Actions

Considering the crafting tree and the mechanics of crafting, Sullivan discusses the overly masculine nature of crafting in games and the lack of appeal to a broader range of gamers (Sullivan et al. 2020). To meet our goal of an inclusive family game, we will include material mastery through examining materials and crafting different items with them, along with the ability to customize each craft through painting, etching and whittling.

Earlier in the module, I reflected on my lack of active participation in team selection. As time has passed, I feel very strongly that a more active role at that stage would have been beneficial in my understanding of team skills and experience. I am confident that forming the team around the 2D concept and a love of retro games (Freeman and McNeese 2019).

Brown discusses soft skills in team development (Brown et al. 2009), focusing on people, process and planning. Self-assessing on these topics, I believe we had a great group of people and expect to collaborate with a few again in future. Process wise, I think we had good solid aspirations but suffered at the execution, possibly due to lack of experience with common shared tools. Planning wise, I feel this saved the team. The leader was very well prepared, supported us in balancing new ideas, and kept us on track. I have taken these ideas and intend to use them in future projects.

Considering communication within the team, face to face meetings were our most effective form of communication despite their challenges. Given that indie development teams are typically geographically diverse (Freeman and McNeese 2019), this is something that I will evaluate more closely before I engage in collaborative game development in future.

References

  • BROWN, Quincy, Frank LEE and Suzanne ALEJANDRE. 2009. ‘Emphasizing Soft Skills and Team Development in an Educational Digital Game Design Course’. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games. 240–7. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/1536513.1536557.

  • DEMARCO, T. and T. LISTER. 2013. Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects. Pearson Education. Available at: https://books.google.com/books?id=NVgUAAAAQBAJ.

  • FREEMAN, Guo and Nathan J. MCNEESE. 2019. ‘Exploring Indie Game Development: Team Practices and Social Experiences in A Creativity-Centric Technology Community’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 28(3), 723–48.

  • KANODE, Christopher M. and Hisham M. HADDAD. 2009. ‘Software Engineering Challenges in Game Development’. In 2009 Sixth International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations. 260–5.

  • MCDANIEL, Rudy and Alice DAER. 2016. ‘Developer Discourse: Exploring Technical Communication Practices within Video Game Development’. Technical Communication Quarterly 25(3), 155–66.

  • PETRILLO, Fabio, Marcelo PIMENTA, Francisco TRINDADE and Carlos DIETRICH. 2009. ‘What Went Wrong? A Survey of Problems in Game Development’. Computers in Entertainment 7.

  • SULLIVAN, Anne, Mel STANFILL and Anastasia SALTER. 2020. ‘Crafting Is So Hardcore: Masculinized Making in Gaming Representations of Labor’. In International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3402942.3402976.

  • WASHBURN, Michael et al. 2016. ‘What Went Right and What Went Wrong: An Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Game Development’. In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion. 280–9. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/2889160.2889253.