Post Mortem: AIE End of Year Major Project 2020

General:

Being the Producer for Absorb has been a roller-coaster of highs and lows and a constant learning experience. This project is roughly the fifth game I’ve worked on that I have taken on the Producer role. Over the last two years, I am happy to say that I have become quite familiar and confident with the role and this project has certainly challenged and taught me the most about being a Producer. 

Early in the year, my Design co-worker, Uriah Overton and I knew that we wanted to try working together for the end of year major project. We had never really gotten much of a chance to work on a game together in the first year of study but we were already really good friends and knew we had a very similar taste in games and ideas on what games we wanted to make. I think deep down we both would have loved to make a “Souls-Like” type game, with maybe just one big boss fight (funny enough another group did this pretty well) but we steered away from it as we worked together on a short vertical slice of a game of this type about mid-way through the year and realised how difficult it is to make well. Throughout the year before Pre-Production began, Uri and I would often discuss and theorise about what game we should make. Some aspects of the game that we discussed throughout the year that ended up making it into the game were gothic/abstract theme, combat focused, strong story and world building and 3rd person fixed free camera. 

A few weeks before Pre-Production began, Uri and I both got on discord voice-chat and hashed out exactly what kind of game we wanted to make. We discussed things like the main core mechanics of the game, the theme/setting, the gameplay loop, our core pillars, what goals we wanted to achieve over the project and other people we wanted to work with. The discussion was very successful and by the end of it we managed to get a rough skeleton of a GDD and had a pretty clear idea of the kind of game we wanted to make. The main mechanic we both agreed would be really interesting to center the game around was the idea of absorbing enemy abilities and using them against other enemies. We also agreed on the game being a third-person action/combat based hack’n’slash game, set in a gothic/abstract world with a strong story and strong world building.

Things that I did well:

I knew from the start that I wanted to be the Producer but I also wanted to contribute to the concepting of the gameplay mechanics and main gameplay loop. I also handled the world building/story/lore, level design/set dressing, asset implementation, team management (particularly the Art Team) and scheduling/task assignment/general organisation. I think I performed quite well in most of these areas overall.

In particular, I completely concepted and fleshed out the entire story/lore/world building for the game and also the player character and villain’s backstories, connecting them all back to the gameplay in a way that all makes sense. I also concepted the starting area of the game, including what it was (in terms of a setting), the way it would teach the player the main mechanics (basically a tutorial) and was fully in charge of it’s greybox and then iteration over it until the gold milestone, based on large amounts of various feedback. In the end I think it eventually all came together and I am genuinely really proud of that area of the game. I think it conceptually came together and successfully tells the story of the game subtly to people who are interested enough to look for it, it successfully teaches the player the main mechanics of the game (based on watching various different people play through the game) and came together thematically, as a ancient technology facility that uses the player character as a battery to fuel it. I was also responsible for implementing around 80% of the assets in the game into Unity along with creating all their respective functional prefabs.

I felt as an actual Producer I was overall quite successful as well, I think I was able to keep everyone on track throughout the project by running daily stand-ups and managing HacknPlan. In particular I worked very closely with the Art Team to ensure people were on track and knew what they were doing, also ensuring assets were being completed in an order that was in line with priority. When things would come down to crunch I would help the team organise and work through things in a way that would get things completed on time but without overloading or stressing people out. I felt I was a very nurturing and understanding producer too, never coming down hard on anyone and giving people the space and time they needed to complete things.

Although I did face a lot of challenges with struggling to take on initial feedback/criticism towards my work and also challenges with frequently losing 8+ hours of work (sometimes once a week), I am very proud of myself for pushing through all of this in the end and not letting it defeat me, persevering all the way to the end of the project. 

Things I could have done better or would like to improve on in the future:

There are many things that I could have done better in this project. In terms of the Producer role specifically, I could have definitely been much more involved with the project as a whole, instead of being mainly Art Team focused. I overall felt extremely out of the loop with the entire programming side of the project and this definitely affected my ability to get involved with the gameplay side of things. The reason this happened was because programming is absolutely my weakest skill set in the game design spectrum. I am very confident in pretty much every other aspect of game design but programming is where I really struggle. I was much more comfortable with managing the Art side of things and implementing assets into the project and doing level design/scene dressing. Uri is much more comfortable with programming however, so I felt quite at ease with him taking charge of that aspect of the project and working closely with the programmers to implement everything. This was honestly a big mistake on my part. Being that this project was supposed to be a huge learning experience for everyone, it would have made much more sense for me to push myself out of my comfort zone and get more hands on with the programming side of things. This was an absolute missed opportunity on my part and it also caused my level design to probably not be as good as it could have been if I was more familiar with how everything worked.

Another mistake I made was letting myself tunnel vision too much on one particular task and letting other responsibilities pile up. This was especially the case with doing the level design for the game. Originally the level design was split between Uri and myself but then we decided that I would take over the entirety of the level design as Uri was very busy with the gameplay side of the project. I found myself hyper-focusing on the starting area of the game and definitely neglecting the other areas of the game because I was desperately trying to make the starting area perfect. Although I ended up being very happy with the outcome of the starting area, the other two areas of the game definitely suffered because I neglected them, with Uri having to take over and do most of the level design for those areas in the end.

Something that I think as a joint effort could have been done better as well was Uri and I tended to almost never collaborate/work together on something. Almost every day we would split up into different voice chat channels on discord, usually only hearing from each other a few times throughout the day. I would do stand up and HacknPlan updates in the morning and then Uri and the Programmers would go into the “Programming” voice chat channel and myself and the Artists would go into the “Art” voice chat channel. It made sense to break the disciplines off into the different channels so that they could collaborate among themselves without distraction from the other disciplines but Uri and I should have been a lot more proactive in setting aside good chunks of time to just be in our own “Design” voice chat channel. I think this ended up affecting the design aspects of the game heavily in the end, as there was not enough iteration, discussion and collaboration that went on between us. Splitting into different chats all the time also caused me to end up being extremely out of the loop with the programming side of the project, to the point where I was not comfortable at all with editing anything relating to the gameplay aspects of objects in Unity, again meaning there was not much iteration and collaboration in this department.

Personally I could have also been better at managing my own personal stress and anxieties relating to the project and been better at not letting feedback/criticism affect me in negative ways. I received a very large amount of feedback and criticism towards my starting area level. People wanted me to cut the scope down immensely, the level wasn’t getting across what I wanted it to and it wasn’t teaching the player what it needed to be. Initially, alone to myself, this criticism would hit me very hard and I would feel almost attacked or that my work was just not up to a good enough standard. I eventually was able to get to the point where I did take everything on board and in stride but initially it did affect me quite a bit but I want to make sure things like that don’t affect me like that in the future. There was also the matter of the version control software we were using “GitKraken” causing me an incredible amount of stress and negativity. This project was the first time I had used the software so naturally my lack of knowledge, familiarity and skill in the program caused many problems for me and the project. Many times, a merge/commit would fail or conflict, causing me to lose sometimes up to 2+ full days of work. This would happen almost once a week for a while too, eventually wearing on my mental state quite a bit to the point where I almost lost all motivation to do any more work because every time I poured 8 hours of work into the project, it would all vanish down the drain in an instant. In the last week of the project, I had a GitKraken incident that ended up causing me to lose about 8 hours of work and causing my GitKraken to become very tangled and unable to be unraveled by even a programming teacher’s guidance. This really took a large negative hit to my already waning motivation to the project and I was almost ready to give up. Fortunately through the support and advice from my girlfriend and Art Lead, Nicole and my own resilience and perseverance, I managed to push past the roadblock and just took the loss of work on the chin and just kept going. In the end I finally managed to tame GitKraken and get used to it, not having any more issues with it for the rest of the project and also getting probably the most work I’ve done throughout the entire project in a one week sitting.

Finally, in general I think my overall work ethic and punctuality needed to be better. I will say that an aspect of the fact the project was done remotely from home (due to COVID-19) played a part in this but I am still responsible for my actions here. There were many occasions where I would come into the team group chat 15+ minutes late and this is especially a bad look for the Producer. I also did catch myself procrastinating and ignoring important, pressing tasks throughout the project.

Overall:

In saying all of this, I think overall myself and the team did an excellent job at creating a game that was on point with our original concept and goals. I think we were all able to push through the various challenges we all faced in the project and the year that was 2020 and came out the other end with our heads held high and a lot of knowledge gained. I consider myself very lucky to have worked with such an amazing group of people and the project would not have been what it was without every single person’s hard work and dedication to the project.