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Sooo…this has been a long two weeks. I ended up going home, with the game in a great place, and a promise that we’re going to all work over break. That was quickly thrown out the window when we we’re told that our school was closing halfway through the break. We’re going to a purely online curriculum now, and people are encouraged to stay at home, or basically away from campus.
Luckily, we had planned for two weeks of remote/not as productive work, so we weren’t hit as hard. Our spreadsheet was very useful, we were able to grab tasks that needed to get done, log bugs easily, and check what work is being done. I’m very happy that we set it up like this, since a lot of the team, myself included, didn’t have anything to work off of for a long time. Because of this, we didn’t get a whole lot done. But the programmer team and some of the artists and designers were able to continue working, so the majority of tasks were able to be completed or at least started on.
But after all of this, we needed to have a big meeting about scope. Myself and the rest of the leads all met up for about an hour after a general team meeting and discussed the scope of the project, what we can do now, and how long we have. We thing that the school won’t open up for the rest of the semester, so we’re all going to be working remote from now on. So, after discussing various work from home strategies for meetings and collaborative work, as well as our team’s hardware available to them, we reduced the scope of the game. Instead of having month long, procedural generated quests, those are going to be hand written and will have 12 total, enough for an entire year of content. We’re also cutting anything that isn’t already in the game in some form. Mercenaries for hire, seasons, and general town upgrades are all cut. It was a tough decision, but based on the time we have left, we think this is the best idea for the game.
After that, we planned out the rest of the work. The State of the Game presentations I make every week are more important now than ever before for communication, so I’m going to be hyper focused on making sure communication stays consistent through these last few weeks of development. As always, I’m really proud of the team and what we’ve accomplished, and thanks to the hard work we’ve done previously we’re in a really great spot for finishing this game!
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