Before the Jam

The project we are working on - a fairy tale beat 'em up - was originally part of “Gourdtober,” an internal studio game jam for the month of October. We wanted to use the jam to pursue several goals:

1. We wanted to take a break from our multi-year project so we could come back with fresh eyes after releasing this smaller project. We also wanted to create a finished, polished game that we could use as a calling card while we continued to work on our larger enterprise.
2. Each individual team member wanted to build upon specific skills and chose to design a game around these personal goals. We also took this opportunity to juggle around the roles we had been operating under in our larger project.
3. This was just after the height of the Unity runtime crisis so we also wanted to use a smaller project to learn a new game engine. We chose Unreal for a handful of reasons. First, it is one of the two major engines, and second, one of our team members wanted to focus in on 3D lighting - a particular strength of Unreal.

Our internal jam was intended to follow the framework of the Greenlight Jam where each week was devoted to a specific part of the production process:

• Week 1: Concepting
• Week 2: Prototyping
• Week 3 and 4: Full Production
• Week 5: Polish and Release

The first week was successful and we had a strong concept going into week 2; however, this is where things started to lose momentum. One team member needed to shift their attention to external contracting work, which took more energy and time than expected. By week 3 this team member needed to mostly step away until their contract was over. The biggest downside of this temporary departure was this team member was the designated project leader for Gourdtober.

As the remaining three team members continued to work on the game, the design continued to evolve as the project moved along which created a rift in understanding between the three members meeting regularly and the fourth. We also entered this project under the assumption it would have a quick turnaround and abandoned some of our more time-intensive project management and documentation practices in order to allow more time for actively making the game. In hindsight, this abandonment led to a completely unorganized and disparate collection of resources we made for the project and further contributed to the fourth member falling behind in their familiarity with the game.

The rest of October and early November, we started to feel the effects of these early missteps. Gourdtober completely lost momentum, with the remaining members of the team ineffectively poking around the project attempting to find a direction for progress. The 3D environment aspect of the project had gained a little bit of traction and went through lighting tests as well as a full level blockout before stalling in the modeling phase. Our 2D character art made some progress, with various sketches produced of potential characters and art styles, although this effort was hampered by our missing teammate. The narrative aspect of the game had story outlines and first drafts of scripts generated but got held up in storyboarding. Finally, our programming efforts made decent progress, getting a basic prototype attack playable, but were hampered due to incompatible stand-in character sprites, focusing on too many aspects of combat at once, and having all the coding saddled on a singular person. Needless to say, as we exited Spooky Month many team members were feeling lost and overwhelmed by the state of the project.

Finish Your Game Jam

Getting Into It

The beginning of November saw a mental crash and imposter syndrome throughout the team in the days leading up to Finish Your Game Jam. For the first time in weeks we had all 4 members back together again and the team conducted a vibe check as we slid into the second full week of the month. Each person was still interested in the idea of the game and wanted to continue working on it, although we voiced concerns on the lack of organization and leadership in the project.

Goals for the Jam

The root of our problem was the lack of project leadership which led to no one feeling like they were able to make decisions or give critiques on work with any sort of authority. Our originally designated project lead was burned out from their contract work and asked to have someone else take the reigns. We wanted to use the timeline of the Jam to retool our project and get back on track. This included:

1. Establish project leadership so we had direction for the project.
2. Compiling and documenting our understanding of the project so all team members are on the same page.
3. Be able to re-enter production on the project with clearly laid out and achievable goals.

Status During the Jam

By the end of our first day with our new project mindset, we accomplished our first goal. We designated a game director and creative director - split to accommodate exterior work obligations - and the directors met to discuss how they would co-direct, to create a breakdown of roles needed for a successful project, and to assign team members to those roles. We took into consideration the work that people were already doing and how they were handling that assignment, and made sure that there was always a designated secondary person per department who could jump in to help when needed. This new reallocation of the division of labor gave everybody clear areas of responsibility and will prevent any one aspect of the project from overwhelming any one person. We took time at our next stand-up meeting to go over those assignments and work as a team to ensure the choices made and the language used made sense to everyone.

We spent the next week in pursuit of the second goal: compiling all of our design conversations and resources into a centralized hub for design documentation so project ideas and direction are clear. We created breakdowns for environment art, character art, player and AI movement, player and AI combat, and narrative. This also allowed us to revisit the research we had made into the beat 'em up genre and appropriately discuss small gameplay and artistic changes we could make to our designs to make our lives easier as the project goes along. We also created wireframes for the game, going from the main menu to the introductory cutscene to combat to the boss and final cutscene. 

On the coding front, we are refactoring the existing code created during October one step at a time. Instead of attempting to work on each feature of a beat 'em up at once, we are focusing on layering functionality in one at a time, making adjustments, and repeating. Additionally, since we are using a new engine to us, we have specifically assigned some members of the team to familiarize themselves with Unreal and blueprints before jumping into helping with code. Finally, we have stepped away from modeling the levels and are instead creating a basic “tutorial” room that we can use as a stage for combat, animation, and playtesting.

On the artistic front one solution we brought into our production practices are designated end of week review sessions for the team to get in the mindset of giving useful feedback on deliverables created during the week. We have also decided to spend the next month taking one character through the entire animation process, from concept art to character modeling and rigging, and finally through to polished animation. We realized that trying to worry about every character all at once was overwhelming to the point of being paralyzing, especially when the 2D artist was treading new territory with their art skills. Pulling back to focus on just the player character will allow us to really dial in on the process. We also finally named our game!

Lessons Learned

• Don’t skimp on documentation when working in a team
• Have someone in charge of accountability
• Create space for critical feedback
• Designate someone to lead milestone and goal creation
• Regularly check in with team members
• Have overlap in job functions on a team so no one is solely in charge of everything

End of Jam and Beyond

The last few days of this Jam are when we move from restructuring our project into going back to active development. Using the Jam as a restructuring and reorientation point for the project has been immensely helpful and given the team a much needed confidence boost to continue building the project, coincidentally it falls directly in line with the Jam theme of Picking up the Pieces! We are now focused and motivated, and we have set ourselves up to successfully create a playable prototype by the end of 2023. We are looking forward to having one of our members bring it to their first PIG Squad event in the new year!