3/2 - 3/23: Scope Reductions Amist COVID-19

We’ve had quite a bit of progress over the past 3 weeks, but also quite a bit of setbacks

Plan and Assign Tasks (18 hours)

My main priority was to assign the tasks for my pod members, which includes 4 artists, 5 programmers, 3 designers, and 4 sound designers (pod members have been shifted around since my last blog post). We now had a much clearer idea of what the enemies in the game would be like, so figuring out tasks was much easier this time around. A large portion of this job was creating documentation about the enemies to keep everyone on the same page (an idea suggested to me by Logan Hughes). I created a confluence page for every enemy that looks like this:

A enemy page for the Acrobat enemy, detailing the sprite, animations, sounds, and scripts used.

In addition, I wanted an easy way to track the progress of each enemy in the game, to make it easier to assign tasks and access the overall scope. To this end, I created a “matrix” of all the enemy statuses in the game, detailing every component of the enemy that needed to be created and it’s status. It looks roughly like this:

Here’s how I broke down giving out tasks:

• I’ve been asking some artists to switch to creating animations for the enemy. This ultimately proved to be a big challenge, because not many of my artists had experience with animation. While amber’s tutorial helped significantly, each artist had a unique problem with their animations. One artist didn’t understand how to use git and unity, while another had issues with the lighting on her sprite. Through this, I helped each artist figure out their strengths and weaknesses, and I ultimately got to know them alot better.

• Programmers would create more behaviors for enemies. Because alot of the core behaviors were done, a few programmers were tasked with design or switching to another pod. There were still some components, such as the movement script for the Stalker, that needed to get done.

• Designers were focused on “fine-tuning” the enemy prefabs in the game. “This involves figuring out the right level of difficulty and the right level layouts for the enemies. You should be making or suggesting changes to make this enemy better.

• Sound Designers were focused on creating the sounds that the enemies will make in the game. For instance, the Stalwart enemy would have a really loud roar, the Stalker would have a grunt sound as it throws the projectile, etc.

Another major part of the job was planning the scope reduction of the game. Because of the outbreak of COVID-19 in Michigan, many of our pod member’s lives were upended. Many had difficulty actually getting their tasks done. As a result, Nico made the call to scale back the number of enemies significantly. At first, I didn’t like this idea, as it meant most of my member’s work would get cut. However, I eventually came to realize that it was necessary. I fought to make sure that it was a fair scope reduction. In particular, I wanted each artist, designer, programmer, and sound designer to be able to point to an enemy and say “I made that”. It was important to me that each of my members, many of whom I’ve gotten to know personally, would know that their contributions were valuable. While it was a hard fight, I was able to convince Nico and the other leads of my beliefs, and we ultimately picked 5 enemies that would be in the game. These are the Acrobat, Dropper, Qrabz, Stalker, and Stalwart.