The Project So Far

As Josh said in an earlier post, we're into the production phase of the project. This blog was started yesterday, and we actually started this project two weeks ago with the pre-production phase, so I want to quickly catch everyone up on what's happened so far.

Our team was given the brief to design and implement a 3D game on the 28th October 2008. We used one day to assign roles for Project Manager(myself), Lead Designer(Ben), Lead Programmer(Josh), Asset Manager(Shawn), and Build Master(Keegan).

There are ten of us in the IGAPR08 class, and besides the roles assigned above, we also all have the role of Programmers/Designers.

We were given two weeks to create the Game Design and Technical Design Documents.

We spent the first week discussing, sometimes calmly, sometimes passionately, all the possible ideas we might want to implement. The decision came down to either a real-time multiplayer 3d tower defense type game, or a 3d action/strategy time travel based game. We chose the latter, and then used the remaining week to create the Game Design Document followed by the Technical Design Document.

One of the hardest parts was solidfying the initial game idea into a complete set of game features and rules. As there were ten of us, we all had slightly differing views and ideas of what the game would look like. Even once most of the details were finalised, we kept finding hidden assumptions in the design that needed to be nailed down when not all of us agreed on how certain objects in the game should behave. In the end, for the final 20% of the design, only 2-3 people worked on it, while the rest of the team started writing the parts of the game that had already been decided on.

One issue we had was that some changes were still being made to the Game Design while we were writing the Technical Design. This caused several re-writes of parts of the TD, causing delays and sometimes confusion as to what was still in the game and what wasn't.

However, after all that, we finished the Game and Technical Design on Monday this week, and got approval to make the game on Tuesday afternoon.

We're ahead of schedule currently, requiring a review of the initial project plan to reorganise it to take into account certain tasks taking less time than originally estimated. This will let us know if we can shift resources to other parts of the game.

Stay tuned,
Paul