ReGUNstruction Post Mortem Part 2

Introduction

My name is Cody Ray and I was one of the Game Designer’s for ReGUNstruction. Our group, collectively named Mad Labs, is a small group of six Master students from the Game Design Master’s degree program at Full Sail University.

Re-Gun-Struction is a gun building first person shooter (fps) being made for the PC. It was made to be a prototype for our Class Prototyping and Content Creation, which teaches us more about the prototyping phase of a game and some of the hurdles and challenges we will face in this phase.

from my point of view there were a number of things I believe that I, as well as my team did right while building this prototype as well as a number of this we did wrong, I will discuss both of these points as well as what I believe we can do to improve upon them.

Things we did right

1. Learning, there were a lot of things I had previously no experience with before starting this project but to do them I had to actively seek out tutorials or seek advice from my peers in order to complete them, and for many of them I accomplished this. And example of this would be creating scripts for buttons and sliders on the menu canvases that I was tasked with crating.

2. Work Productivity, I consistently meet or exceeded the work hours required of me for every capstone. For instance, the total required/expected hours for this month were 140 hours, by the end, I had occurred 163 hours.

3. Assistance, one of the things another team member, Brian did, was assisting other members of the team who needed help, myself included. I had a number of scripting questions that he was able to help me with that ultimately allowed me to complete some of my tasks.

Things we did wrong

1. Communication, many times I would ask a question in our Discord server and I would more often than not, not get a response for a few hours if at all. There were also a number of instances where problems occurred in the game because we were not communicating, one such instance is where one of our team members, who’s task was to delete unused assets deleted a number of assets we were using. This occurred because 1) his task was not communicated to him effectively and 2) he did not ask questions.

2. Resource Allocation, I am a writer, however, despite this the producer of the team refused to assign writing tasks for the project and forced me to take tasks that I previously had no knowledge on how to do. This forced me to spend more time on tasks that I otherwise would have trying to learn how to do them and sometimes failing.

3. Meetings, while it is true that if you don’t need to have a meeting then you shouldn’t have one, we didn’t have any. In fact, we didn’t have any face to face meet ups attempting to do the project remote. While we were able to do it successfully to an extent, there were many times I wished one of my team members was next to me because I had questions I wanted answered immediately or needed help with something which is significantly easier to do in person as opposed to remote. I believe many of the problems we experience might have been averted if we were meeting face to face.

4. Team Work, the biggest problem our team faced is that with some exceptions, we did not act or function as a team. Instead of us being a team that was trying to build a game, we were a group of separate individuals that were working on our assigned tasks and that’s it.

5. Documentation, the documentation and work log for the project could have been better, the way it was formatted made filling out the document very inefficient and I felt wasn’t able to effectively show how many hours I put in.

Conclusion

Re-Gun-Struction was fun to make and work on, I learned a lot from the experiences both good and bad. Working on this game really opened my eyes to just how much I don’t know and how much I need to learn if I want to pursue a career in this field. It also taught me the importance of team work and just how much a lack of team work can affect of moral, I really felt alone on this project even though I know I was not the only one contributing let alone contributing the most. It also made annoyed that I was not allowed to do any writing because the producer felt it wasn’t necessary and having to try an learn everything as I went made me feel as if I wasn’t contributing enough because of how long it takes me to do the tasks. Finally, this project taught me the importance documentation and how good documentation or lack there of can seriously effect the project.