itch.io

Is the steam release planned to be somewhat soon or will it be far in the future ?

Really fun despite just being a typing game!
The sounds is what makes the difference and even some strategies came up! Looking at the keyboard or the screen depending on if the word is one I know or don't know how to spell. Good times can't wait to see this game improve

i like avocados ;)

Introduction

Today I would like to tell you about how I helped my 8 person team to literally tripled our productivity despite being busy people spread out across the globe with no financial incentive. I want to point out that these tips can easily be adapted to smaller teams of 2 or more and can even help any solo game developers out there even though I will be talking a lot about management theory.  

A few of us want to work in the games industry in the future and decided to finish this game to improve our craft. We have been working for the last 4 month on a 3D Hack and Slash featuring a satisfying, fast paced combat system. The code name of the project is Scklash, yes I know it's literally just the word Slash with a K haha. The game is about a cyborg samurai racing against death to reach the top of the mountain and defeat the AI boss that took over his village. He uses Japanese shrines to meditate and restore the clock in addition to using his enemies as temporary life vessels. Sadly, during these last few months we have been going very slowly because of recruiting and no clear deadlines among other things. At the start of this Jam we only had the main character and enemy models with no textures, animation or VFX . We also had an okay amount of bug filled combat code but a lot of refining still needed to be done. But now we are well on our way to have the final version of the combat that we will use on release for you guys to play and give feedback on the 31st!

I really struggled to motivate my team and help them find time in their busy lives to continue work on the game even though we all agreed we loved the concept. I was really worried that we would either never make this game or finish it in a year. It was time for a change, I had heard of Scrum and Sprints but hadn’t yet implemented it thinking it was a bit weird to use this system that many big businesses used for software development. I needed to adapt it a little because making games is a fairly unique thing that was very different from say developing a website.

Sprints

But first to incorporate the Agile method, I had to become what we call a “Scrum master”, someone that controls the Kanban board and makes sure the sprint goal is reached. Now, what are all these terms ? A sprint is a time frame (between 1 to 4 weeks) where the team aims to reach a specific goal that is common across all disciplines. My team uses 2 week sprints and our current sprint goal for the 16 is simply, Finishing Enemies. This for us means getting Animations, VFX, Textures, Sounds and Code entirely done for all 4 enemies. I told my team that I was worried because this was a very ambitious goal but it also was the speed needed to finish the game within the new deadline. This was the third deadline I had set since the start of the project and part of my new changes was to absolutely respect deadlines which the sprint helped me a lot with.

Indeed sprints are great to keep people on track since there is always a close enough goal/deadline that your team can keep in mind and work towards. Having a goal for the entire team and not for each specific disciplines like art or code re-frames everyone as a team working side by side to reach the same goals. However finding a goal that all departments can work towards that still fits your overall timeline is not easy. This is where you see that things don’t translate perfectly from software development. Since games require many different skill-sets that might be at different points in the development cycle we can’t always have one goal. My next sprint for example will most likely need to be a multiple goal sprint with one for the code team and one for the art and audio team. If anybody has any other solution to this struggle, I would love to hear it!

Of course just implementing this system isn't all I changed even though it is a great way to work and helps you build a lot of good habits. Sprints work together along with a task system that insures the sprint goals are reached.

Thanks ! I wanted to do more with the tileset like I did with level 1 but we didn't have the time sadly.

Good looking game with great music that goes faster as time goes by. Game dose take a bit to much time before ramping up to the out of control part.