Producer: Carson G

Artists: Colin O, Bea G

Programmers: Matt P, Joey C

Designers: Ilan F, David G, Morgan M

The team formed in our Intro to Game Development class for our third project.  This was my first team with many people rather than the typical team of 4.  I brought organizational skills to the team which was crucial since this was everyone’s first time on a team this large and a variety of skills.  Colin was able to bring animation skills to the team and created every animation performed by the player character.  He also created the UI assets.  Bea brought skills in tilesheet creation and logo design, but the title screen was created by one of our designers on this project.  Matt was able to focus on the sound so we were able to have a variety of interactions and created the wave systems.  Joey was the programming soul of this project and created the AI pathfinding, animation implementation, over mechanic, and bread spawning.  Ilan was able to paint the game for us and David was designing the GUI and planned out the map.  Morgan was the one who created it in Unity and was responsible for the creation of the main title screen you see when you play the game.  

Tooling

For the creation of this game, we use the game engine Unity which was provided to us students.  The game script was created in C# in Visual Studio.  These were able to link directly into Unity without having to go through other channels.  The team used GitKraken to stay organized within the repo and work on the same files.  Pixilart.com was used by Colin to create the animations.  Bea used her own drawing software to create the logos and the words for the game.  These were chosen for convenience because this was such a short project over the course of 3 weeks.  For sound creation, we created most of our sounds using a microphone and then edited them on our own systems.  Redmine was used to organize the project with each individual task and organized our documents for submission.  But on the other side of the organization, we used Google Drive with multiple different folders which allowed everyone to edit a document anytime before submission.

Location

The team mostly performed their meetings in the Piano Room in EATS on campus, but a lot of individual work was done in our individual dorms online.  Classes were two times a week and during this time we presented what we had completed in the current sprint, and the second class was more of a regrouping or the professor went over something important to help with our overall performance.  We met outside of class about 3 times a week for planning and work sessions.

Brainstorming

The very first meeting for the team was concept development held on 11/17/21.  Everyone on the team created 2 concepts to show off and create a basic summary of how the game will function.  2 of these concepts were combined and turned into our final game concept.  Matt presented a baguette-based sword-fighting game while I presented the concept of escaping a group of zombies that are all gluten-free and you defeat them by throwing waffles at them.  These were combined to create the concept of defending your bakery from gluten-free zombies by beating them with a bread sword.  But it was challenging getting to this point since everyone was attached to their personal concept and wanted to stick with it.  But after some convincing and mixing a bit of everyone’s chaos into the pot we ended up with Breaking Bread.  

We ended up deciding on the concept because of Joey’s input on how much he’ll be able to do with this game.  With his confidence and my lead, we were able to convince the team that we were in good hands and started development as soon as possible.  We did have plenty of other concepts and those can be seen below.

Process

The first week of the game was strictly concepting and developing drafts for the map and gameplay.  We started off with where this game will take place and how large we want the map to be.  Discussion of the weapons in the game was also lengthy discussion and Joey started working on the AI pathfinding plus basic combat.  After week one we had a map that was chosen, a tilesheet in the works, a base of the main programming feature implemented, and sounds in the work.  Sprint 2 was the creation of the first game build and animations implemented from enemies and the start of the character animations.  This process started to get really complicated but with my guidance, I was able to keep us on a level head throughout this sprint and kept morale up. But sprint 3 got really chaotic because things that were promised by others were not being created such as some features and the UI.  But through the confusion, I was able to stay above it all and prioritize what the minimum is to get done.  The game was finally created using my organization skills and level head.  Breaking Bread was even able to have some additional features such as a faster oven and a tutorial.

What Went Well

My favorite part of the game was how I was able to manage a team of 8, including myself, for the first time ever and still create a game like this.  It still astounds me and really makes me think that this game was a sign that I should stick with being a producer.  The game had every feature that we promised and my favorite part is the oven mechanic.  The reason for this is that it interacts with multiple different functions in the game’s code that for a 3-week game would seem impossible.  

The next best thing about this project was the amount of productivity we had in meetings.  We as a team had a lot of work meetings many of them lasting a few hours to get work done. Now, this was a lot of time spent discussing and on our laptops, but it was necessary and it even sped production because working together helped us stay focussed. Even though we had time to talk with others in the meeting it was a social and productive time with each other.

What Didn’t Go Well

As a team, we could have done a much better job communicating with each other outside of meetings. There were a lot of unanswered texts and emails from members which cause confusion about what people were doing. This caused some panic at the end of the project as there were a lot of things left to do and no one was communicating with each other.  Granted people may have gotten stressed and needed a break but this could have also been communicated back to the team.

We could have also had smoother transitions between the sprints and a smoother hour curve.  At the end of sprints, we had a lot of work put in at the very end which was very chaotic. We could have done better at flattening how much work we have been doing each sprint instead of it spiking at the top. We should have done more in the first 2 weeks of the project.

What We Learned

We learned that it is very important that the entire game is planned for the first sprint rather than just going week by week. we also had a very mechanic-heavy game planned for the first sprint and we had to downscale a lot. If we planned better then we possibly could have had more polished features.

 We as a team had a blessing and a curse to be put on a team of 8 in an introductory level class to make a game.  With this, we learned how to work with such a bigger team dynamic rather than a team of 4. We know how the different departments are all reliant on each other and that we don’t need to be scared to ask for help because most likely there is someone who knows how to do what you need to do.