So there we were! Six people of varying skills and abilities! Ready to get started on our grand project that would knock everyone’s socks off! It would be our break out hit, where we would enter the indie gaming scene with an awesome game that everyone would be blown away by. Our names would quickly rise to the top as those awesome game developers that made that REALLY COOL GAME, and the money would just start pouring in!
Well… at least… that’s how we imagined things would go at first.
Unfortunately, reality set in rather fast, and instead of actually making progress on our MAGNUM OPUS OF EPIC AWESOMENESS, we were spending more time tripping over our own shoelaces, which appeared to have been tied together somehow. Whoops.
Our Initial Plans
Our initial plan was this: We would meet in person every two weeks to discuss the project. Each meeting, we would all discuss what needed to be done, then commit to accomplishing several tasks before the next meeting. We would then go our separate ways and work on tasks that we had assigned ourselves during the meeting. Rinse and repeat.
We figured it was a great idea, considering that we all were pretty busy with our lives and didn’t have a lot of time to really dedicate to game development. But with six people doing it… SURELY WE WOULD BE ABLE TO ACCOMPLISH GREAT THINGS!
Our first few meetings went fairly well. We brainstormed various game ideas until TheCallMeVroom came up with a brilliant idea: an action/puzzle game with a zookeeping theme. “Across the Zooniverse” was the name we came up for it. We immediately set about investigating various game development tools. Jamie showed us Unity, and we glanced at a few other engines, but the sheer power and ease of use that Unity gave us sold us on it pretty fast. We took off running to run through some Unity tutorials, learning some art, build some infrastructure, and figured we’d be well on our way to getting a game made.
We’re all set to work! … Now what?
Okay cool! So we got all set up with all this infrastructure… We got a whole website put together. We had an idea. We had a free 3D game engine. Now it was time to start working!… AAaaaand WHAM. We smashed right into a wall.
Actually.. it wasn’t quite a wall… Thing is… as mentioned previously, none of us had any idea how do to any sort of game development. We all just sort of stared at the game design and went “Huh?” TheCallMeVroom was churning out pages and pages of content with all sorts of ideas on level concepts, storylines, etc. Stuff that would be great to add to a game, eventually. But her ideas provided little in the way of concrete game-play for the immediate future. I was focused on our infrastructure and was busy getting that up and running, so I wasn’t doing anything with the game itself. Jamie and Akuma were doing some concept art, but weren’t anywhere near ready to produce 3D models and textures and stuff. Dana was playing with music to try and compose music that would eventually be part of the game, but music and sound wouldn’t be something we’d be focusing on until further down the line.
Simply put, we had bitten off more than we could chew, and we began to feel it pretty quickly. Folks started having other priorities, such as school, work-related stuff, etc. I had to leave what little work I was providing the team as I prepped for a talk I was giving at my alma mater on software engineering and being LGBT. Jamie got lost in schoolwork and prepping for her finals. Everyone basically was scattering to the four winds, leaving our group project behind.
It was just… easier to prioritize other things in one’s life when you were nervous about coming back to the large monsterous project that no one seemed to know how to tackle. Andrea did a bunch of work on the game for a while. She even put together a working prototype in Unity… But in the end, she lacked direction, and everyone else was a bit too anxious about the project to provide any. So by late November, Artless stalled, and the Zooniverse project had ground to a halt.
In our anxiety in dealing with Zooniverse, we all wound up running off to work on our own independent projects for a few months. From that, came my Combo Cards 0.3, Andrea’s RicoTank, and Jamie’s Dream Blaster. But instead of talking about those projects now, and what we learned from them, I’m going to cut the story short here and come back to it when I do.
What went wrong?
What went wrong? Well… until we actually have something working right, it’s a bit difficult to answer that question. But as we’ve moved on from this first experience, learned on our own, and started a new phase of team work… What we learned was this:
1) We were too damn big. Six people is a ton of people to try and coordinate into getting anything done. Especially if they don’t know what they’re doing. ESPECIALLY if there is no clear leadership and everyone is trying to pass the leadership buck to someone else. We’re still on the largish side… but we’re hopefully learning to coordinate our efforts more effectively these days. (More on that in a later entry.)
2) Trying to learn to do 3D game development in an unfamiliar system was probably the biggest part of what went wrong there. Simply put… None of us have ever done 3D anything, with the exception of Jamie, who had learned about 3D modeling in school. Trying to learn that while simultaneously trying to learn to do game design, level design, project planning, team coordination, and everything else was just insane and doomed to failure from the start.
3) Investing only a small amount of time on an extremely infrequent basis was not going to get us anywhere. We needed to get focused and work hard if we wanted to accomplish anything of any reasonable merit.
4) We spent too much time focusing on the epic goal of awesomeness, and not enough time considering what needed to be done *now.* It’s great to imagine how to spend the imaginary millions you dream of making on your game… but… uh.. first… before you can even make one cent… you need to actually, you know, *do* something. Which we didn’t do. We had a big collective ego balloon that needed bursting, and burst it did.
As we move on, we’re trying to learn from these lessons. In part 2, we will discuss what we learned from our own experiences going on onto our own projects. In part 3, we will talk about how we have taken what we’ve learned to try something new, and hopefully, by then, have something substantial to report about our latest game development project: A 2D side scrolling action/puzzle platformer game called Rock Bottom.
We grabbed several of our good friends that are interested in game development and have begun working more formally on getting some projects out the door. Combo Cards and our Arimaa implementation were just warm-ups for this. Rechristening ourselves “Artless Entertainment,” we are focused on working together to get a real game put together and finished. Our current project is called “Across the Zooniverse” and is being developed in the Unity game engine. (Which reminds me, I should really write about that engine at some point.) We also have a website now! 
