This is the postmortem for the Collaborative Game Project module, which saw us form our own groups and build a game around the theme of “Resist”.
CREATING A GROUP AND PITCHING IDEAS:
I was able to team with Aaron, Ollie and Kyle for this module. I worked with Aaron previously through Foundation Year and through first year and had seen Ollie’s blueprinting skill in Unreal when taking the Level design module, so I was very happy to be in this team. We created roles, such as sound design, coding, art and environment design and assigned the roles ourselves based on the person’s strengths, with myself and Aaron taking the roles relating to art, Ollie taking the coding and Kyle taking the sound design.
With the team now created, we started to generate ideas around “Resist” and how they would translate into game genres and mechanics. As we were a small group in comparison to some of the other teams in the module, we were aware that if we made the prototypes increasingly complex, we would require more time, more research and would have a higher workload in order to be able to successfully complete it.
We then started to create the prototypes for the upcoming pitch, so we set a goal to create one prototype per week in order to be ready for the presentation. Myself and Aaron would make concept art to support the prototypes and design the environments, Ollie would create the code and mechanics for the projects and Kyle was to create sound effects and music. I’d like to state that Kyle had no contribution in the creation of the prototypes or to Hank’s Happy Hour in general; He did not create any audio or sound effects and the last interaction that we had with him was on the date of the presentation.
For the presentation, I created a blank PowerPoint that was uploaded to Sharepoint to allow for all of the group to access it at the same time. Whilst we were creating the prototypes, we could fill in the respective slides as we went with information in real-time, while leaving a space at the end for the final idea. Using Sharepoint for the Powerpoint made the creation of it easier, as we didn’t have to continuously save the file and then reshare it when one person had made edits.
By the final week, Myself, Aaron and Ollie had decided on taking the third prototype, Hank’s Happy Hour forward as our chosen idea, as during the prototype phase, we found that this idea made us laugh and we knew that when building it, it would be a fun time. With our idea selected, we started to create a running list of assets, sounds, levels and mechanics that would be needed for the game to reach a completed state.
CREATING A PRODUCTION SCHEDULE
I created a Trello board and amongst the group, we split the workload down into what was required in specific weeks; Within our chosen roles, we added to the game as time progressed and remained in near-constant communication over Discord, regularly talking to each other and helping when a member asked for feedback or assistance.
As Ollie was the coder for the group, the overall pipeline for creating the game was predominantly myself and Aaron making assets and levels and sharing them with Ollie to then implement into the master file and add code. An additional resource that was made after the pitch was a flowchart to help aid us in the creation of the game, as this allowed for us to visualize how the game would play, and subsequently from this, what we would need to include in specific areas as a high priority versus what would be a low priority inclusion.
Despite how much we had planned and scheduled, from around the 20th of March the team primarily consisted of myself and Aaron due to members of the team taking a step back or disappearing entirely. This was a big challenge to tackle, as neither myself or Aaron have a lot of experience with coding in Unreal and had to take on additional work in order to keep the game on track. As a result of this, the game was scaled down from what was initially pitched to ensure that we were able to present a basic gameplay loop.
Additionally, I stopped updating the Trello board at this stage as myself and Aaron was the only ones working on the project, leading to us communicating what needed to be done directly to each other during lab sessions or through direct messages/voice calls. One of the other team members would rejoin at the end of the project to help finalise it, yet by this point, Aaron and I had effectively created nearly all of the game, leaving only a few minor things to be tweaked and edit before it would be classed as complete.
MY WORK
My role within the group transitioned from being one of the artists of the group to being one of the group’s coders. Over the course of this module, I had created concept art and static meshes whilst also setting up the split-screen mechanic, the mechanic for the wheel spin, multiple levels, blueprints, animation blueprints and also creating small audio clips.
At the start of this project, I thought that my strengths were solely in creating art and 3D modelling based on previous experiences with creating audio and coding, however, I was quickly forced to learn blueprinting in Unreal in order to take on the new workload to meet the deadlines. Surprisingly, I found it a rather rewarding and somewhat fun experience to see something that I had coded working in real-time, given my overall unfamiliarity with it.
THE FINISHED GAME VERSUS THE PITCH
Over time, the game had changed in certain areas from the idea pitched in the presentation. Initially, we had incorporated the theme of “Resist” into loot boxes that the player could purchase at the start of the rounds, which had a chance to help or hinder the player, but we had to remove this idea and rework it into resisting item drops due to unfamiliarity with creating inventory systems for multiple players.
When the project was left to myself and Aaron, we aimed to reach the minimum viable product first, which led to removing items such as the player’s HUD and having the players have health bars. I still believe that this was the right choice to make, as we were able to then focus on making a fun gameplay experience with functionality rather than forcing it to work and overworking ourselves in the process.
PROJECT REFLECTION
Looking back at the project, I took away learning experiences and altered how I approach group work. Even with how much we had planned and carefully selected the members of our team, we still needed to adapt to circumstances that we couldn’t plan for and redistribute the workload accordingly. I found it to be stressful at points, however, it also forced me to be more hands-on with learning new content and skills to complete the project.
One thing that we had previously discussed was how we found that although our final game was fun to create, it was more challenging to develop than I think we truly anticipated. We did talk about how we wished we had chosen our second prototype, Hidden Horror, as it was a more straightforward concept than Hank’s Happy Hour. In the future, I believe that I will take more care in choosing which concepts to develop, as I found myself feeling slightly overwhelmed at moments with the workload due to how wide of a scope we had for this game. The funniest game idea is not always the easiest to translate into game mechanics, and I feel that we learned this throughout the course of the module.
Additionally, in the future, I would also consider searching for specific tutorials or asset packs that can be bought, providing that they were relevant to the project at the time. If one of my groups in the future is small, purchasing packs or tutorials could speed up the process whilst also being a teaching tool, as we could open and then study the blueprints to see exactly how it is working. During the creation of the game, we had purchased an asset pack that significantly sped up creating levels to play through. This asset pack had several drag-and-drop blueprints, which I used to learn exactly how things were rotating during the creation of the wheel for the main area.
In conclusion, I have learnt that even with meticulous planning, scheduling and team selection, a project can still have issues that we cannot plan for and that I am more than able to adapt to these issues and obstacles to create a finished product. I feel that we successfully created a similar game to what was originally pitched, all whilst encompassing the madness of Hank into the gameplay.