This blog post will document my last work with group Rakshasa and the things I learned from that project.
So, what project? Well, in our group we have made three major projects: A boardgame adaptation of the popular online game Player Unknown Battlegrounds, a concept document for a shoot-‘em-up style game we called ”Trolling them softly” and lastly the creation of a working digital 2D shoot-‘em-up based on a concept document called ”Fear is in me”. Although, as previously specified, this post will only be about the last project, the digital game creation.
First of all, I would like to send a great big thank you to my team members Krzesimir Pszenny (our project manager), Shifat Ul Kabir (our lead artist) and Sofie Lindberg (our lead sound). It has been a real pleasure to work with them and I’ve learned so much during my brief time in this education.
That being said, everything did not go as well as it could have. There are a couple of things that I would have changed with our approach had I known then what I know why. The most important part was that of our slow starting pace. Even though we were among the smaller groups member wise we really didn’t push ourselves enough during the first phase (pre-Alpha) in order to keep up with the larger groups. I know we weren’t expected to compete at the level of groups with more experience and more members but I do believe we could have challenged ourselves a bit more. Especially since the first weeks in a big way helped to form the group ambition and if you start up at a slow pace it is much harder to increase that pace later.
This in turn also led to the second major problem that I found and that was group motivation. I don’t want to say that our group wasn’t motivated because that wouldn’t be true. What I do have to say is that I personally felt some frustration when comparing our groups game to many other group’s games. This frustration didn’t exactly help with development either and I can admit that at times the work I put into the project felt a lot more like a tedious chore than something I was genuinely happy to work on. This frustration hit an all-time low during the announcement and subsequent build-up of the Arcade Game Development course. Since our project wasn’t turning out the way we really wanted it to and everybody was getting so hyped up about the upcoming project it seemed hard justifying putting the time and effort into working on the old project, which severely damaged the end product.
I think the main lesson to take away from this project is the importance of motivation, both individually but also in regards to your team members. I can think of few things more harmful to getting along than different motivation levels.
Oscar