Hmmm 🤔
I am Jaume Montagut. My role in this project was Lead Designer although I contributed on all areas I could to ensure that the project kept moving forward in the right direction.
My main responsability was to make a the game fun experience. For that I made sure that all the design was deliberate and everything we added to the game was to improve the overall experience.
Especially focusing on the parts that mattered the most to us. Such as the distribution with scrum teams to keep the team communicated, and the retrospective meeting to detect which things could be improved and focus on them.
From the beggining, we didn't make much use of scrum teams. The lockdown only made things worse as it allowed us to keep working on the most comfortable way, which was by departments as we had done in the Concept Discovery.
To solve this, we tried the making planning meetings be done by each scrum team instead of the different departments. We prepared them the TODO list extracted from the Backlog and helped the new scrum masters start using our agile board app (ClickUp) to assign the task and set due dates.
Later, we also gave them more organizative power and keept constant communication between the scrum masters and the department leads.
In my opinion retrospectives are one of the most valuable and underrated meetings. A lot of people seem to skip them because 'they are not necessary' you can keep developing just by distributing work and keep going. But I think retrospectives give the opportunity to make the team work faster and in a more pleasant environment.
So even if we were low on time I always tried to save some time to do a big retrospective with all the team. From that we extracted things that we did right and problems for which we then later tried a solution on the next sprint:
- Scrum teams weren't being useful to the overall organization.
- Leaving an encouraging comment helps a lot on keeping motivation.
When the sprint ended, we looked at the different proposals we made and evaluated if they had any effect.
I took responsability of gathering all the tasks that arised during the sprint and organizing them to focus on the important tasks when planning the next sprint.
How it evolved:
Was the assignment where I found 2 problems which needed solution:
- A lot of the ideas that were written on the Game Design Document didn't transform into tasks, as we were prioritizing the requirements that the teachers gave us on each assignment even if they didn't meet our objective for the game.
- There were a lot of things that slowed the blockout, set dressing and balancing down. For example, not being able to edit the engine simultaneously, or needing to break the prefab links to send groups of prefabs between us, so we gave code some ideas to solve this. At the end Oriol Capdevila implemented multiscene editing which allowed us to solve this problem.
So I gathered all the notes on a document and send them to the code lead (Jose Antonio).
I started writing the tasks directly on an Google Sheet.
Writing the problems directly on a single file allowed me to completely skip gathering all the different notes, speeding up the process dramatically.
I also started to dedicate more designers towards filling the asset list with clear references, which had been a task done by the art team at the moment and creted a lot of disconnection between the design ideas and the final assets.
I also ended up making the list public so other members could ask for things that they considered necessary. That list would be later checked by the leads in their respecitng meetings.
On the sprint retrospective we found that the scrum teams weren't being of much use. So I created sheets for all the scrum teams and distributed the tasks from the 'department sheets' to them.
On the previous sprint we detected that some teams relied on the Google Sheet instead of using our agile board app of choice (ClickUp). So I added them on different ClickUp lists.
After the first weeks, it was clear that a lot of different things were being designed without knowledge of other ones. People weren't being informed on progress made by other scrums and as such the design wasn't cohesive. The solution we chose was to organized meetings every wednesday and friday where people investigated different options for solving problems and we took decisions considering its advantatdges and disadvantaged.
I believe that the definitive way to test if your game is fun, is to perform playtestings. As such, I tried to start playtesting the game as soon as possible (when we almost didn't have art). Following the advice of Joan Pons and being organized by Marc Galvez and Guillem Sanchez, the playtestings gave us a lot of insight on what the players' perceptions were about our game and we adapted our design with their feedback.
Bellow you can see some bugs that our first playtesters found funny.
I was in charge of designing the first combos for Geralt. I took as the main inspiration the GDC talk 'Platinum Games: Action Without Borders' by Atsushi Inaba where they talk about desiging based on the situations the player can face.
On a later sprint, I also worked on a prototype to test the core ideas of the game together with Gerard Clotet, Marc Galvez, Axel Alavedra and Cere Venteo.
The objective of the prototype was to test the interactions between two core interlaced systems that we were proposing. The first, a combo system for fast paced action gameplay. The second, a 'collectible system' that affected one of your combos randomly.
The idea being that the player doesn't need to know all the combos from the start, but by gaining small buffs on a specific combo is incentivized to try it and learning different combos.
I also developed a quick prototype to demonstrate the idea behind the camera for the level 2. The idea for this level got ultimately discarted because of the complexity it generated.
For the Vertical Slice 2, we had some mejor problems with the camera transitions that would mean we would have to switch to a different camera if we weren't able to fix them. Together with Jose Antonio Prieto we expanded on the work done by Christian Martinez and Ivan Ropero and were able to get them working on time.
I also helped some programmers debug certain bugs such as the player going faster on some angles with Marc Guillen.
Magical Muffin