Devlog 5: Teamwork

Working as a Team

Working as a group requires constant effort from everyone in the team. You need everyone to fulfil their roles: Programmers, artists, level designers etc. We participated in many activities which really helped with clarity and time management as a group. These activities require input from everyone. These include having regular meetings, using Kanban to assign our tasks, brainstorming ideas, helping each other with issues/advice and chatting about how the playtester played our game to make changes.

Team Members

Ali: Programmer, Level Designer

Brooke: Programmer, Level Designer

Jayden: Programmer, Level Designer

Komo: 3D Artist

Meetings

Regular communication is the foundation of good teamwork. It prevents everyone from being left in the dark, not knowing what to do & what's happening next. Discord was our main platform for communication, and we had multiple meetings where we talk about what our current tasks are, adding additional tasks on Kanban, discussing issues we found and playtesting our game. Later on, everyone's schedule progressively became more hectic or ran into personal matters that sometimes prevents them from partaking in these meetings. 

Kanban

Assigning our tasks has never been easier with the use of a Kanban Board. A kanban board is basically a visual workflow for our tasks to keep track and organises them in stages, such as to dos, in progress and done. Each task is assigned to the team member responsible for it, along with the week its due in. If the deadline passes before its finished, we can simply move it over, which makes it flexible. Additional tasks can also be added after a meeting or if someone forgot. We also use Github to store, manage and collaborate on the changes we make.

Brainstorming Ideas

Coming up with ideas is possibly one of the most fun things to do when creating a game. Especially with other people. You really need your creativity to flow and be unique. We came up with many fun ideas that weren't implemented into the final build like the night vision level and the piano level, either due to time constraints or technical issues. The levels we did come up with, the light levels and the gong level were meant to test the player's stealth as they navigate through a dimly lit room. The objects that the player can interact with glow in the dark so they can clearly see and analyse what they need to do. The toy letter box area is a riddle room where the player needs to correctly place the boxes in order to spell the answer. This room implies that the Rat King is a father trying to put his kids to sleep, giving him more reason to kick you out.

Discussing Issues

Running into issues was inevitable during the development of our game. These range from the use of copyright music to importing model files to code errors. We made sure to let each other know of our situation if we run into a roadblock and tried to figure out together. We would speak through voice chat or message each other through discord. If we couldn't figure it out, we'd move on due to time constraints or try to think outside the box. An example of this is running into the nav-mesh issue when building the night vision level. The problem was the mice kept on getting stuck into the corner, making them easy to capture. We tried many times to fix it. After a while we decided to add portals into the corner, giving the mice an easy way to escape! Unfortunately, we couldnt add the level because time was limited.

Playtesting

Playtesting was fun and interesting to observe. The developer's perspective is different from the player's because they already know what's in their game and already expecting it, giving them the easy advantage, while the player is going in blind, allowing them to notice what slips through the cracks: what makes it easy? What makes it unfair? What's helpful? What's not? Basically, you need to give them the experience you intended to create. How do you test that? Getting people outside the team to test it out. Playtesters can give harsh criticism or don't feel the same way about the game as you do. It's important to not take these criticisms/opinions too personally as it is an opportunity of improvement. During our meetings, we talk about changes we should make to the game, taking the playtester's thoughts into account, making changes that could ultimately help the player, giving them a better experience.