Moody Times was the first real project in university and also offered the first real challenges for me.
Why did I do this?
As with any university project, there is a bit of coercion from the university side, but the cool thing about this project was that it came from my own idea. To understand this you need to know how we do projects at the university:
We get a topic every semester. In this case it was “One Minute” and then we have to come up with a project for it and a certain number is taken and implemented in a team with students. The student team is supported by the professors as stakeholders and coaches. And my idea Moody Times got through the pitches and was implemented. The game was supposed to be a 2D Rogue-like inspired by Crypt of the Necrodancer or similar titles that could only be played to the beat of the music. The interesting thing was that every minute the music changed, from soft and calm to hard rock and with it the gameplay.
And so began my first real project at the university:
What did I do:
Contrary to expectations, I did not take on the role of Vision Keeper. I wanted to prove myself much more as a production manager and manage my team through the project. In retrospect, that was my first mistake in the project, but more on that later.
In the end, I had taken on 3 roles. Project Manager, Game Designer and Programmer.
Game Designer
As a game designer, I took care of the character, world and story, all in collaboration with a student from my team.
We defined what the calm and aggressive phases mean and how the gameplay changes during them. For example, in the calm phase, the player should rather continue the game through jump & run elements, while in the quiet phase he had to fight and survive. We defined the Actions of the Character and built a narrative around that.
That I hadn’t taken the role of Vision Keeper was quickly noticed in the game design, as the idea of a Rogue Likes was discarded and made into a 2D Action Adventure. Which I was happy with, but while my focus as a game designer was on the mechanics and gameplay because that was my original idea, the adventure game got lost on us.
Programmer
I wanted to learn C#, so I wrote a new 2D character controller from scratch customized to our needs. I’m especially proud of the animator, since we couldn’t flip the 2D asset of the character simply because of the character design, I had to build an animator that also checks which direction the player is looking in to play the correct animation. The result looks really cool for an animator.
But what you noticed in the game design and my lack of experience as a project manager was the feature creep that crept in. This mistake cost me a lot of sleep, because I wanted to include everything at any cost, although we had only 3 months for the project. We could have used another 2 or 3.
Project Manager
This also brings us to my role with the most errors in the project. The project management. From the beginning, I had relied too much on my experiences from the internship I had done before my studies. I had already managed a project and approached the matter too confidently.
The tools I used, the approach, that all went reasonably well and also how you should do it. The big problem was the communication between me, the project manager and the vision keeper. It became an even bigger problem when the vision keeper (understandably) withdrew for health reasons and I made the mistake of managing both the project and vision keeping. This exacerbated the feature creep of the project.
What did I learn?
I learned a lot from this project:
- 3 months is a damn short time for an entire project. Pitch, plan, develop, deliver.
- For learning purposes, it’s good to do everything from scratch and new, but it’s a hurdle for project planning and for the product you want to deliver. You should not reinvent the council. You can take great pre-made assets and modify them if you can according to your needs.
- Every failure is a success if you make the right thing out of it.
- I know now why programming with dependencies can be a big problem. It’s maybe easy and quick but very dirty.
- Game Design and features needs to be prototyped, tested and reworked over and over again to create a fun experience.
- Time is a ressource. Do not let a feature creep jump rope with it.
All in all, maybe not the best game or product per se, but a really great (learning) experience. At times, the game would be worth a remake.