Tasks Completed
Fixed broken steampunk rooms AGAIN
Fixed one (1) broken demonic room
Re-made all demonic rooms
Edited all L-shaped and H/I-shaped rooms to contain less obstacles
Created the rest of the temple rooms
Total Hours: 14 Hours
Positive
Room and prefab creation and asset implementation is finally done. I can rest after a stressful time with creating essentially 4 levels with a total of 75 room prefabs to be used for the game.
Negative
I spent way too much time on finishing up on the room creation, but I got it done. That's an accomplishment in itself.
Post-Mortem
Overview
Working on this game has been a bag of mixed feelings. While I initially wanted to work on Holy Tester in the beginning from the previous class, Game Workshop I, my eagerness to work on the game has waned far beyond enough for me to lose interest in it while working on it. Clarifying this further, I did enjoy working on this game for a brief period of time until a certain point where I felt like I was only doing busy grunt work.
All the Wrongs
For one, once I merged into the Holy Tester team, I immediately knew that the game was an organizational mess both in the "production documents and communications" and "game" departments. As a person who finds that being highly organized results in a more efficient and productive production pipeline and workflow, it was alarming to me in the sense of how the team operates and communicates. And it was shown weekly: there wasn't much planning in the design of the game, no formal general team meeting where we all sat and got up to speed with each and every team member, things kept changing on the fly, and definitely no, one single answer that we all listened to and abided by. It was all about this cycle of distribute tasks, produce them, and repeat the process without much care for how something should look like, be created, or even be limited. I find this in fault particularly due to how there wasn't a definitive limitation and/or restriction in the construction of the game itself as a whole.
I wanted to try and fix it - this mess of pipeline errors, presentation aesthetic, and even how our internal documents and communications were constructed. Everything felt so tangled and disorganized; I found it hard to keep track of and make sense of goals, tasks, and deadlines week-by-week and it felt like it needed to be structured, but it never was despite my intention to do so.
Role-wise, I cannot speak much for the programming team, but within the artist team, we didn't specifically define roles for each member. In the beginning, we were each working on tasks that we knew that we could handle and related as much to our skillset as much as possible. However, for some reason we had a separate Character Art team and Environment Art team within the art team, and we hardly interacted despite needing to interact. During my work over the weeks, I actually kind of forgot that there were other artists on the team working on Character Art simply because they just didn't communicate much through our communication medium, Discord. As the quarter progressed, our tasks got more entangled and ambiguous relative to our skillsets, and it became frustrating that we didn't even know what our next task(s) for the upcoming week would be.
My skillset revolves around creating concept art and illustration which would have also served as an attractive exterior for the game. I had a separate role that could have been utilized to really sell the game on a presentable and alluring fashion. Instead, I only did that for the first couple weeks and then was switched over to implementing assets into the Unity engine for the rest of the quarter because "concept art wasn't a priority." This broke me on a personal level as this basically reduced my personal goals and excitement for this game to nil, and I attribute it to how there weren't stricter restrictions to the amount of content in the game from the very start. Towards the end as more content was created that was tailored towards the illustration and promotional materials side, I was not given such tasks to work on and I felt extremely demotivated. Still, I kept working on my tasks.
There was a week where I went to SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles and I gave my team early notice that I would be gone for a week and wouldn't have been able to work on the game. Yet, despite my absence, there was backlash for my return in how nothing got implemented into the game. As far as I was concerned, I gave early notice that I couldn't have done any work or even tweaks to the game while I was on my trip. I completed all my tasks for the week before my departure, and yet things still went missing. Not only was my role crucial, but my team could not get anyone else on the team to replace my job in my absence. I'm not particularly convinced that the fire during that week was my fault. There were arguments and text fights and it changed my in-person relationship with those particular team members. I stand by my viewpoint, and though I'm past it, I see this as a loss in potential friendship.
In terms of assets going missing, this mainly concerned how room prefabs were created and merged into the main development branch on GitLab, but for some reason during some weeks, those assets would be inaccessible or simply not exist. This frustrated me to no end and I think this was probably due to other people merging in their branches while they were several branches behind, particularly some artists on the team who weren't that used to how Git worked on an internal level. This loss of work wasted a lot of development hours and I feel like this was one part of development that could have been avoided 100%.
All the Rights
On a more positive note, there were some things that I enjoyed working on and learning while on this project. Right from the start, I knew that I would have to learn how to work in a team with a larger team member count. Early on, I got to make a good number of concept art for characters and environment assets for the game, but they were only designs through linework, not painted and more. I also got more used to using Git in conjunction with Unity, learning about branches, and how to utilize them to the team's advantage in terms of delivering assets. But that's really all I got from this game project, and it wasn't much. This is not a project that I would use for my portfolio as I didn't gain much experience in my skillset out of it. If there's one thing I've learned, it's that in future game projects, I would take measures and set up procedures before design talks and production on the game even starts to make sure nothing like I've experienced happens to anyone in my future game teams.
Conclusion
In the end, I care deeply about my work and how it relates to the disciplines that each and every team member associates themselves with. I care that it's done right, not how much gets done. It's the only reason I would ever write something as long as this post-mortem. Overall, this game is a feat in and of itself in terms of content, but it needs more refined work... in all areas of production, especially when it comes to art and animation. The team dynamic, their organization, and their communication is not one I would willingly participate in again. Although, I enjoyed it while it lasted and I did my best in everything I accomplished this quarter.
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