Planning for the Trailer (Week 7)

The hardest part for me this week was that I was away from production and could not do all the things I wanted to do. The feeling of leaving the team behind during this crucial time was something that made me feel as though I was letting the team down. The plan was that I should have done the trailer this week but due to the fact that I would have no time to work on it, I put the responsibility for it on the team. However, I worked on a trailer outline so that it would be easier for Alexandra and the team to start and make it better.

When I started thinking about the trailer I thought about all those standard one’s that has text that flows past while the game is going on in the background, showing of the features in the game.

The plan I did consisted of 8 “frames” or passages and it went as follows:

1. The team’s logo, Littorina sounds logo and the game’s logo.
2. This is where the heroes are introduced, as in “Become the general(hero)” and it would go from there to the world map and showing of the level select.
3. After this we go into the gameplay, show of the matching of three, and show the placement of towers in order to stop the oncoming forces.
4. Here is where we showcase some of the different levels.
5. Here we show of the different hero abilities.
6. In this frame we show of the benefits of levelling up the hero. Tell about the unlockables in the game as well. And that you upgrade towers.
7. Then we come to the ending of the trailer where I thought of a cheesy line “Can you conquer this land?”
8. And finally ending with the logo once more.

This is of course a basic outline and something that needs iterating.

 

The thing that I will focus the most on this upcoming week will be that the production runs smoothly and that the presentation becomes complete and presentable. I can make or break at the presentation because I tend to blackout when people ask me questions in front of other people.

Preparing for Presentation(Week 6)

It’s really difficult to get a good structure on a presentation and that is one of the things I have been working on this week. The power point presentation for GGC is something that is looming on the horizon and I am a bit nervous about it. I have been having some problems with the structure, what to say, what is important to mention and what will sell the game.

It is difficult to know how much you should explain and what is important to tell. It’s not just what you say but also what you show, how do you show off the work that has been done.

There is still a lot of work to do on the presentation but it is starting to become something cohesive. It will take practice, practice and practice before I will feel comfortable, but I have to make sure that I am well prepared. This is the background for the presentation as it stands now.

 

One of the things that is important is the way it all blends together and to have a smooth transition between slides. Since it is my first time with a power point presentation I find it a little bit challenging.

Homepage and Progress (Week 4)

This week I spent some time everywhere as usual 😛

However, my focus has been on the homepage that we started and getting it up and running without trouble and with a good visual. I am not used to making pages so it will continue to take time for me to get it in proper shape. This is a banner that I created by combining and tweaking some art from Mariam.

I have also spent time on the power point presentation that we will use to present att Gotland Game Conference which has to be flawless and I have to be ready to face any question that might come my way.

There has been a lot of things that has troubled me this week.  Mainly it is the workload that has been put on the graphic artists and if we will be able to get the graphics that we all want  in the end. It’s difficult as a producer to decide which things to keep and what to cut before it’s too late to change things. It’s also really difficult to be on top of everything, know just how things are going and if you have to intervene. I have to become more strict and be more upfront with what I want done, and be more attentive to what is being done.

This was not a long post but I have been doing a lot of things that I don’t even know where to start 😛

 

What have I learned this week:

Focus on things that needs to be focused on.
If you start a homepage, make sure you have graphics to put there which will make it look a whole lot better.

Hopefully the structure will be better next week 🙂

Producer’s Quandry(week 3)

The title is maybe a bit exaggerated but being producer really puts you in certain kinds of positions where you have to make decisions and deal with the potential consequences.

This week has been a challenge for me, because I easily feel that I am not doing anything useful, even though I know that I have to do the things that makes the production progress without hick-ups. Allowing the team to work without being interrupted. It is definitely different from doing code which is what I am used to doing. I am everywhere, explaining things and making sure that people have work to do which makes me feel that I am not doing anything.

The decision that I talked about in the beginning was the decision to change the perspective of the game from a top-down one to a isometric one. The consequence of this decision will be divulged in the following weeks but the worry is of course if our artists can manage to get polished art assets for GGC. That perspective needs more details and more animations that the top-down did not need. But hopefully since we changed relatively early in the production we will pull it off.

This is the top-down perspective that we have at the moment:

One of our artist had a character(from a previous project) that had the perspective that we were deciding to change to so we put him in the game to see how it would look like.

After putting him in the game we felt that we could do this.

So what have I actually done this week? the most important thing that I have done this week (except the decision of perspective change) is playtesting the game all the time. It really helped finding bugs and things that did not work. It made the iteration of things easier that the programmers fixed something and I tested it and said if it worked of if it needed more work. This quick way of exchanging information makes the game progress a lot more quickly than implementing everything essential and then playtest it.

 

What have I learned during this week:

Tough decisions have to be made. What will make this game better?
I definitely understood the value of playtesting a lot during the development. Things are discovered early and taken cared of.
I have to get used to the fact that I am not a coder in this project and I have to be the one that makes things flow flawlessly.

I can’t wait to see what next week will teach me, but it sure is exciting. 🙂

Diary of a Producer (Week 2)

Another week has passed and it feels as though I have been everywhere and nowhere. I have done changes in the design and written them down so that the team can see what these different things is supposed to do. Of course it is difficult to keep the design document alive as the design changes and it does take a lot of time to keep it up-to-date. I have also been writing in our production blog that you can find here: Deconstructed Development if you are more interested in the development.

A lot of my time has been spent on jumping back and forth, answering questions and sitting in the scrum. At the start of the week I had some problems to understand all the different animations that I had written down in the backlog of the scrum. This was a huge problem because if I don’t understand what has to be done, then how am I going to convey it to my team? so the solution is to sit down with the lead artist and go over them again.

This Friday we had set a deadline for our first playable prototype and the team managed to produce it in good time. The level that we have playable at the moment is level 5 so it is a bit difficult. Here is a screenshot of how our game looks like at the moment:

There is a lot of placeholders still but the game is taking shape and I can’t wait to see what changes next week will bring.

One of the biggest things that happened this week was that I got in contact with an audio designer in the hopes that he might be able to do the music and sound effects for our game. I was nervous before meeting him because I was not sure what he wanted to know and how it would go. He wanted to know about the game and the design so that he could get a feel of how the sound and music would be like, and also our plans for the game. It feels like a lot of the stress has been lifted from our team because of the fact that we will have  a proffesional that does our music. That person is Roland Koch at Littorina Sounds.

What I learned during this week: 
Be very descriptive in the backlog so that you can go back and understand it(saving time).
Take initiative early(as in contacting audio designer now and not later because it takes time to do music)
I should think about the entire project but I should not be afraid to delegate work.

Role of a Producer (Week 1)

Hey there! it’s been a while since my last post and I will try and do one post every week now 🙂

This week I started a new course that is called “Big Game”, we have 10 weeks to do a game that will be presented on GGC(Gotland Game Conference) at the end of May. During this project I am going to be the producer which basically means that I will be  the one that knows everything about the process, thinks of everything that needs to be done and makes sure that people work and have fun while they are doing their work.

There is a lot to think about when you are the producer that I have not thought of and the pressure of doing well is always there. I think that the first week went well for our team but I felt that I could have done more. The things that I worked on was the design document, project plan and the scrum. This picture show the scrum we have in our office, each colour represents each individual person in the group(except the red and green one).

This system is really helpful to see how the week is going  which is way more fun to look at than the screen of a computer 😀

The project plan was something that I hadn’t done before and I had to think about a lot of things. When should things be done? What are the potential risks? and how do you plan on solving them? also the deadlines within the project. The thing I have learned by doing this plan is that if everything is written down, it becomes more real and people are more likely to follow it if it is on paper.

I could have handled a lot of things differently this week but it was a learning experience and I think that next week I will be more prepared for what I am suppose to do 🙂