These past few weeks have been very important to the development of my Game Production II's team game, not only because we have been making a lot of good progress on the game itself, but because we had to prepare ourselves for the upcoming Greenlight. Game Production's Greenlight at my college consists of all the Game Production teams getting their games ready for a large presentation which will be shown not only to all of the students taking the course but also all the professors currently teaching the class. These presentations take place live on campus with all of the students and professors gathering together in a large auditorium and watching each team present their game in order to pitch the idea and convince the audience that their game is worthy of moving forward for the rest of the semester. After Greenlight there is a vote which will then determine which games are strong enough to move forward, and those which are cut will stop completely and the team members are reassigned to another team which did make it through.
As you can tell, Greenlight is a very big deal for Game Production II, especially if a team is very attached to their game and wants to continue working on it for the whole semester. Because of this it takes a lot of preparation and commitment to not only make the games as strong as they can be by that time, but also creating a professional and compelling presentation to really show off the best features of the game to the audience and convince them why it should move forward.
Creating our Presentation
For my own Game Production II team, Rats with Hats, our Greenlight presentation luckily was a big success. Going into Greenlight and creating our presentation we knew we wanted it to be as professional and organized as possible to give us the best chance at being selected to continue through Greenlight for the remainder of the semester. Because of this, we decided to look at past Greenlight presentations from previous successful teams and loosely base our own presentation on the format and organization of theirs. After spending a lot of time and effort creating our presentation we were able to practice it during our last class before Greenlight in order to receive feedback from both our professor and fellow classmates. It ended up being a really good idea to do this practice run because we received a lot of helpful feedback from our professor on how to improve the presentation. Because of this we actually redid most of the entire presentation to make it even better than it originally was and we ended up having a really strong presentation after this. Once our final presentation was complete we made sure to practice presenting it multiple times before Greenlight so that we would be as organized and well-rehearsed on our lines as possible. Looking back on this now I am very glad we practiced so many times because it made the actual presentation go very smoothly, with everyone remembering all their rehearsed lines for each slide and having very little hiccups.
Greenlight Selection
Now that Greenlight is over I am personally very proud of what our team was able to accomplish and I believe the presentation went really well. At first, I was nervous about our game making it through Greenlight selection, not because I didn't believe our game concept was strong enough, but because I worried that other teams would be more charismatic in their presentations and would be able to sell their game more successfully, even if their concept was not as strong as our own. However, all these fears were eliminated after hearing the news of which teams were selected to go forward after Greenlight, and our team was chosen! After hearing the good news, my entire team was so relieved and excited to have made it through Greenlight, as this now meant we were able to continue working on our game for the rest of the semester! And not only that, but we would also be receiving a lot more teammates to join us and help us create the vision we have had this whole time for our VR game.
I am relieved and very proud of my team for what we were able to accomplish with our game concept and presentation in making it through Greenlight. I truly do believe we deserved to make it through Greenlight because of just how much time and effort went into planning for Greenlight and revising our presentation so many times. We really put everything we had into that presentation to show our game concept in the best light and it has now all paid off. Not only that, but I am also happy about the other team from my class which was chosen to go through Greenlight. There were originally four teams in my class with four different game concepts, and two of the four games in my class ended up being eliminated after Greenlight. I truly believe that my team and the second team from my class were the most deserving to make it through and that both of our games are going to be very strong by the end of the semester. I am genuinely excited to see both of these games at the end of the semester and what they will turn into with so many weeks of work put into them.
Adapting After Greenlight
Now that it has been a few weeks since Greenlight I can see that the rest of the semester is going to be difficult, however it is a challenge that I know my team will be able to overcome. I personally have never worked on a team this large before and it is surprisingly difficult to keep track of everyone and everything all at once. Our team currently consists of 10 people, twice the size of our original team before Greenlight. This is because the people from the two teams in my class who did not make it through Greenlight selection had to be dispersed into the two remaining teams to form the two giant teams we now have in class. The most difficult aspect of working on a team this large thus far has been communication. Even though 10 people does not seem like a very large group, when you are working on such a complicated project such as creating a game it quickly becomes difficult to keep everyone organized and up to speed about what everyone else on the team is currently doing. Because of this, our team has decided the best way to approach this problem would be to split our team up into two smaller subteams, the Content Team and the Systems Team. These two teams are responsible for different aspects of the game and it makes it much easier to communicate in these smaller groups of people and then relay that information across teams. Mostly thanks to our amazing Producer, our team has been really successful in introducing our new team members to our project and keeping everyone organized in their workload and communication with each other.
From this experience so far I have mostly learned that communication is a huge challenge when making a game with a team larger than 5 or 6. It is very important to have some sort of organized system in place in order to relay information to each person on the team who needs to know that information, and not giving people unnecessary information for what their job is. For example, it doesn't make sense for all of the artists on a team to be involved in a group chat with all the programmers because that will just be unnecessary information for the artists to know and will only complicate things. Going forward I will be able to bring this knowledge with me into my big Capstone project during my senior year of college, and even into my career past college, in order to know how to properly communicate with my team in a large group setting such as this.
Pushing Past Setbacks
The very first week after Greenlight our team, unfortunately, went through a very large setback in the production of our game. We previously had developed our VR game to use the Oculus VR headset using Oculus's own code and systems. However, after Greenlight the headset we previously had been using for testing and playing our game suddenly became unavailable for us to use, and so we were left with no Oculus headset and no way to actually play our game. This is obviously a huge problem, as there would have been no way for us to properly test our game or experience it the way it was meant to be experienced, in VR. Because of this, we had to make the difficult decision to reformat our game's code to instead use the SteamVR platform so that our game could also be played on other types of VR headsets, including the Vive which we did have access to. This reformating of our game took up an entire week of our development time which, in the context of the semester, was a large chunk of our development.
The Future of Our Game
Fortunately, after getting our game up and running for the Vive headset we have been advancing with the project really well. Even though we now have one week less of development time, I still believe we will have enough time to complete all of the things we initially set out to finish in our game. We are currently close to finishing the first level of our game and are making preparations to begin work on the second. I believe that by our next sprint we will have level 1 fully implemented and working, if not perfectly then at least functionally. After that, we will focus our attention primarily on level 2 while continuing to polish level 1 in the background. I estimate that by the end of this semester we will have level 1 completely finished and polished, and level 2 functionally complete but not fully polished. It would, of course, be nice if we could have both levels complete and polished to the best of our ability, but I do not think we currently will have time to complete level 2 as much as we ideally would have liked. However, even if the second level is not perfect I still believe by the end of this semester we will have a very impressive game which will be a nice portfolio piece for each of us to use moving forward in our careers after college.
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