IGF Submission

Team Hack'N'Hide just entered Cyber Heist to IGF.

It's a fantastic feeling. Even better than that has been how evenly paced we've been throughout the last few weeks leading up to the submission. Of course, we upped our workload a bit, but we've been pacing ourselves accurately so that minimal crunch occurred.

It was quite astounding to see the game come together almost seemingly out of the woodwork. About two weeks ago we finished with the final features of the game and began polishing the game a ton. We were blessed to have extensive feedback from faculty on the way that the levels went out, and our planning paid off when we were able to reconstruct all the levels over again based on their feedback.  

Being able to completely reconstruct the levels from scratch was, in my opinion, the biggest sign of good planning and foresight. It was also a great test to see how the level-creation process works and how effective our team could be at it. Had it not been for the remarkably frustrating process of having to implement custom code for the tutorials, the entire process of building all 6 levels would have taken the greater part of a single afternoon. Things are looking fantastic for future level iteration. 

Tutorials were significantly more difficult to get right than we had anticipated. With the help of Joe Bourrie from EA, we were able to really break down the things that we wanted to teach the player and introduce them in the order that they made the most sense. As simple as we thought the levels were, there were plenty more ways to make the levels even simpler, every time we thought we were "done". We playtested with three different groups to see how they reacted to the tutorial prompts and iterated them every time. 

Being at the point that we could just focus on player feedback and tweak small things at the game was fantastic. I frequently referred to this as "chump dev"; the stage of game development that anybody who hasn't made a game thinks that game development is all about. We tweaked, we altered, we bug-fixed, we band-aid'd, and it turned out to be great. We submitted our game calmly, ahead of schedule and excited for the post-IGF changes that we're going to make.

Our team rocks.

Proved Process and Professional Playtesting

This week was midterm evaluations.

I got to talk with Jose and Roger one-on-one (well, one-on-two) at length about what kinds of things we've been doing well and what kinds of things that we can improve.

I was extra pleased to hear Roger admit that we had proved him wrong on the process we implemented for the team. I wasn't the as excited over proving Roger wrong (he also loves being proved wrong) as I was excited to hear that the rest of the team not only tolerated the process, but actually approved and appreciated it. It was a producer's dream come true.

The process was two-fold: first, put in tons of review-checks and roadblocks to prevent off-design-concept or sub-par features from making it into the build. This prevents people submitting things without a clear concept of what the feature is or how it's supposed to perform. Second, hand-assign tasks to our team (comprised almost entirely of engineers) to make sure that tasks are appropriate for our relatively wide range of talent. This also has the side-effect of making people very accountable for the tasks that they've received. There's ownership over what they did, and everyone can take pride in the specific thing that they were in charge of for the game.

A combination of the summer one-on-one approach for the team and Zac's insight on how EA worked helped make this process really shine, and the team is running smooth as silk. However, Roger and Jose cautioned that "functioning" is not a reason to celebrate. There's all kinds of things that we can be doing to improve where we currently are on the game to bump our game up from good to excellent.

Among those ideas, the most exciting idea is to start making visits to other professional studios to get feedback and show off the game. We've just set up a visit to Wahoo Studios in Orem for next week, and I'm crazy excited to get professional opinions on it.