Since the start of my college career at Champlain College I have taken many classes related to my Game Design major which have been preparing me for what it will be like to be employed in the game field. A lot of these classes have been focused on individual talents, learning the basics of how to properly design a game and use common tools such as Unity or learning C++. I have also taken classes such as Game Production which is aimed to simulate what it is like to work on a team with other game developers to produce a game together. This class in particular has been extremely important for me to learn how to work on a team together with other developers and make a game together using strong teamwork and communication. For the most part I prefer to make games on my own, as then I can be more free to make my own design decisions and not have to worry about the effort it takes to cooperate with others to make a cohesive product. However, my time in Game Production has helped me to better appreciate working on a team in this setting and has prepared me for when I graduate and will end up being hired into a game company where I will need these team skills.
My Production II Class
In this post I am going to be focusing specifically on a class I am currently taking called Game Production II. In this class there is a mostly even number of all the different game majors, Game Design, Game Programming, Game Art, and Game Production Management. All the students are split up into four or five teams, each with at least one student from each major so that they are balanced and have all the skills needed to create a game together. To be completely honest, I did not enjoy my first Game Production class. However, I believe the only reason I didn't enjoy it was because I wasn't on the right teams for me. It seemed like I was always paired with people who I didn't work well with, particularly because they were never quite as organized or hardworking as I am personally. Now, I am not trying to toot my own horn by saying this, however it is important on any team that all the members put in an equal effort and are trying their best to make the product as great as it can be. With these teams I was on in the past, I felt as though my other team members just didn't have the same work ethic which I did, or that they weren't as organized or communicative as I was, making it very difficult for me to enjoy working with them. But now that I have started Game Production II and have worked with new people, I have learned that it wasn't the class I disliked, but the teams I was on. As I will describe more in the next section, I have stumbled upon the perfect team for me, and I am now very excited and happy to be taking this course.
"Rats with Hats"
At the start of my Game Production II class we were split up into various teams somewhat randomly. Our professor instructed us to form teams which have at least one student from each major, and for the most part this ended up being whoever was sitting closest together at that time. I didn't know it then, but the team which I ended up with was going to be the start of my personal favorite team of people which I have ever worked with to date. We did an excercise to come up with as many game ideas as possible, and after that we needed to pick three games which we wanted to actually prototype and then choose a team name. Our name became "Rats with Hats," which was created from a combination of one of our game ideas involving the player taking control of a rat, and the fact that most of us on the team happened to be wearing hats that day.
This team had a perfect assortment of one student from every major, meaning there were four of us total. I already knew most of the people on the team, but not very well. I had interacted with most of them before and even worked with some of them in previous classes, but I wasn't super close with any of them. However, that quickly changed as we began working together as a team and inevitably started to become closer.
After that initial first week of prototyping our three game ideas, our team was actually disbanded as for the next week we were all mixed up and put onto brand new teams of random people. We specifically were instructed not to be on a team with any of those same people, just so that we could get the experience of working with different people. However, after that second week it was clear to everyone on my first team that we all genuinely loved working together, and we decided before our third class even started that we wanted to team up again for the remainder of the semester, for which we were allowed to personally pick our own teams. It was a complete agreement for all four of us that we wanted to work together again, and I couldn't be happier about it. We even were able to choose a fifth person to work with us, as we ended up having one less team in the class than before. The other members on my team had another designer in mind who they knew well and knew would be a perfect fit for our current team. I personally didn't know this fifth person very well, but I trusted their judgement considering they all wanted to work together again because of our shared work ethic and communication skills. This fifth person ended up also being a perfect fit for our team, and so this is how we ended up with the current five person team we now have.
Our Best Week
The main intent I have for this blog post is to describe what I personally believe to be the strongest prototype week ("Sprint") which my team has had so far in our Game Production II class. I am going to cover multiple different reasons for why this sprint in particular was so strong for us and what we did to be so productive in such a short amount of time.
Choosing Our Prototype
When we finally grouped up together again as a team, we decided that we wanted to make something which was more of an "experience" rather than your typical video game which most other Game Production teams create. We wanted to make something which was unique compared to the other teams, and something which hasn't been done as frequently at Champlain College. One team member in particular really wanted to work with Virtual Reality, as it is a game medium which isn't tackled very often at our school, mostly due to the fact that it is new technology for us and it is much more difficult to really get it right compared to a more "traditional" non-VR game.
When we had our first team meeting for the sprint to decide what type of game we wanted to create, we ended up going way over our scheduled meeting time simply because we went so in-depth into each individual game idea our teammates brought to the table. We really wanted to make sure we were all on the same page when it came to which games were feasible and which would be the most interesting to create. The meeting ended up being over two hours long, and mostly consisted of us just talking about the proposed ideas and arguing over which we should choose to tackle. This was a big decision, as we could end up working on this game idea for the rest of the entire semester, so it wasn't a decision to be taken lightly.
Learning VR
When we finally decided on a game concept to move forward with, we were taking on the project knowing that it would be a big learning experience for all of us, as none of us had ever worked on a VR game before. We knew it would be much more difficult for us than if we didn't choose VR, but it was a risk we were willing to take as the result would be worth it if we could pull it off. Additionally, by choosing to work in VR, all of us on the team would be able to experience working with VR and would be much more informed when it comes to working with a real game company which could potentially create VR games. With this project under our belts, we will all be that much more experienced in various game types and will likely have an easier time being hired when it does come to graduation and choosing a career path.
Team Work Ethic
Now, onto part of why this specific sprint I am talking about was so successful and productive for us. The biggest reason by far for why we had such a good sprint was because of our shared work ethic across the entire team. None of my team members are "slackers" by any means. If anything, I would say we are all over-achievers, wanting to make our project as successful as it possibly can be and create an amazing game experience for the player. We were all genuinely really excited to work on this project, which just fueled our productivity during this first sprint working on our VR game.
Each person on my team commits to their designated tasks and doesn't make any excuses for putting things off or only half-completing things. When someone says they are going to get something done, you can rest assured that it will be done (unless something comes up which prevents them from completing it). We are all able to trust each other to get our tasks done without worry, which is hugely important for a team setting. And the fact that we all have an equal work ethic makes it even easier to work together because no one has to worry that any one person on the team isn't pulling their weight or is being a burden to the team. It makes it very easy during our planning meetings when assigning tasks to each person, as other people on the team don't need to consider what they will do if someone doesn't finish their share of the work.
Communication
Another reason as to why this sprint was so productive for my team was our communication throughout the process. We use a chat website/app which we all have easy access to to communicate, and we used this chat group every single day of the sprint in order to update each other on what we're working on, ask each other confirming questions, and get feedback on our completed tasks. This active and frequent communication has been a huge help to us as a team, as it allowed us to always be on the same page about what is and isn't being done for the prototype. None of us had to question what we were adding to the game that sprint, how we were implementing things, or who was doing which tasks. As I already knew previously, communication is extremely important for any team setting. However, this team had better communication skills than other teams I had been on previously and it was so nice being able to be so open and confident about every detail of our game.
General Team Excitement
Lastly, what really made this sprint so successful for us was our shared excitement for the project and strive to make it as great as possible. We were all very excited to be working with VR and so our team really went all out, probably more so than if we weren't as excited for the project in the first place. All our team members ended up putting much more time into the game during that one sprint than we had initially planned for during our planning meetings, and this is simply because of how excited we were for it. Had we been working on a dull game idea, our team likely would have stopped as soon as they finished their individual assigned tasks, but instead we just kept adding more and more to it as we went. For example, while working in-engine in Unity, our programmer and second designer completed the tasks they had agreed to for the sprint, but decided to ask the team what else we should add and just kept working on it whenever they could. In a way this was an example of poor sprint planning, as we didn't plan out enough work for everyone to do in the amount of time we had. But we also didn't anticipate getting so much done so quickly, and the fact that we would want to keep working on the project even after completing our tasks.
My Contribution
Ironically, even though this sprint was, in my opinion, our team's strongest sprint so far, it was actually a weak sprint for me personally. Due to the poor sprint planning I mentioned above, I finished my assigned tasks for the week and then had nothing else to do, while other members on my team just kept adding more and more stuff as they thought of it. This lead to me having the lowest number of hours for the sprint out of the entire team, not because I didn't want to work or that I was too busy, just that I didn't anticipate the rest of the team doing so much more work and I wasn't sure what else I should do. Like I said previously, the programmer and second designer on the team were working in-engine that sprint, but I wasn't. This made it difficult for me to continue working on the game, as I was mostly just completing documentation, which is difficult to keep adding to once it's done, unlike the game where they could just keep adding new mechanics and assets. While I did all of my assigned tasks well and on-time, compared to everyone else on the team it looked like I was the one who wasn't pulling my own weight.
Looking Forward
Now that the sprint is finished and we were able to sit down together as a team and discuss what went well and what didn't, we ackowledged the fact that we didn't do the best job of planning out tasks for the sprint. We simply did not give each person as much work to do as they were capable of doing, which resulted in some people going above-and-beyond on their amount of work, and others not quite knowing what they should be working on. With this knowledge in mind, we are now taking a more detailed approach to planning out tasks for each sprint, making sure that the work is evenly distributed to each person on the team. I do believe that this was a good learning experience for us, however, and it will make our sprints going forward even stronger as we will have even more detailed plans for the work to be done. In the future, if something like this did ever happen again and I found myself without enough work to do, I will make sure to speak up about it to my team and ask for more work to be given to me from somebody else, that way we will not have an unfair distribution of work hours.
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