Sanctum Infernum - Week 1

This blog post has been adjusted as part of a resubmission assignment.

Hello and welcome to a new blogpost for a new project that has begun development. Currently unnamed, it is meant to be a AAA game developed in a larger team than with my last group project. Much like last time however, I am on the programming team for this game again but this time, I have taken on a much more important sounding role in the team. Keep on reading for all the details because this one is going to get interesting...

Setting up the team

One of the first things we did for this project this week was set up the team itself. A crucial thing to note about our team is that we're separated between people in Guildford and people in Birmingham to make one large team. So when deciding team leads, we aimed to have one for both towns. Also, since I am based in Guildford, I will be primarily discussing what is going on there.

Anyway, We had some hefty discussions for who to give what leadership position. Some positions were decided almost instantly, for example, me being given programming lead was apparently a no-brainer for everyone else around me. Other positions like design lead and product owner were involved in a lot more discussion however.

In the end, this is how our team leads in Guildford look:

Another few things to note is that:

• There were no business students in either Guildford or Birmingham so there is no business lead.

• Birmingham has no programmers, so there is no programming lead in Birmingham

For the rest of the day we got started with discussing ideas, setting up lines of communication with Birmingham, as well as creating a group for the leads to communicate with each other directly. Us leads also decided that we should have a group meeting between us each week and we decided on it being done the next day, which was a Thursday.

We had a group activity where everyone across Guildford and Birmingham were split off into three groups. Each group were to come up with a game idea and pitch it to everyone else. I was put into Group 3. After some heated discussion on what we would make, we came up with the idea of a roguelike dating simulator that takes place in space. Group 2 presented an idea of a souls-like heavily stylised around Greek mythology, and Group 1 presented an idea of an RPG that takes place in hell. In the end, the game idea that we decided on was Group 1's hell RPG idea after a very intense vote between the 3 games.

Almost immediately after that, the newly assigned Product Owners of the team set up resources such as a Trello board for us to immediately note down some tasks, with each department in the team getting their own board:

The very first task for the rest of us leads involved setting up a small backlog of tasks and identifying what we should do for our first few sprints. I set out a few assignments throughout the week that I figured we should do soon.

I hadn't decide on who would be doing these tasks yet as I hadn't quite figured out the skillset of the other 2 programmers in the team, at some point or another I plan on discussing this with them so that I can set the tasks to people who I know will be able to complete them efficiently.

Leads meeting

The first leads meeting took place and we discussed some basic plans and got a bit more acquainted with each other.

The main thing that was decided for this meeting was that each department would have an hour or two long meeting on Mondays. So for example at 10AM the artists would have a meeting with each other that would include discussions between the regular members of the art team, the art leads and both product owners supervising it. In the case of the programming team - because it is so small with only 3 members - it will be included with the design meeting which will also make it 2 hours long instead of 1.

Near the end of the meeting I made a point that the department meetings should be recorded and put on an archive for anyone to access, this was met with universal agreement.

(Our lead meetings and department meetings take place on Discord, with the leads meetings happening on a group chat and the department ones on a server)

(The meeting timetable)

Department meeting

With the first department meeting, one of the first things that was discussed was how we should approach making the RPG gameplay interesting. One idea that was thrown around was to use cards as an interface for attacking, though this idea had mixed responses overall. One of the main struggles we had was deciding how to make the combat interesting with no one really being able to come to an agreement on something concrete. At one point, someone mentioned one of my previous projects, specifically Haywire, and pitched the ideas I put into practice there as a potential gameplay idea for this game. This idea, surprisingly enough, was met with pretty unanimous approval and is now the idea we are going with.

Another thing we got done in this meeting was assign some specific roles for the designers, mostly designating specific people to tasks like game mechanic design, UI design, etc.

Something I mentioned in the meeting was in regards to the Unity project and GitHub. In last term's project, Seams, I was the one in charge of setting up and managing the game's repository. This gave me a lot of experience and what I learnt from it is that many of the people on my team last time (who are returning to the team now) didn't know how to interact with GitHub properly and since I knew nothing about the people in Birmingham besides that they didn't have any programmers, I wanted to play it safe and make sure myself that everything was going to be set up correctly. With that in mind, I asked if I could set things up and was denied rather quickly by the Birmingham PO. She insisted that she would have it sorted. This annoyed me a little, but it is what it is. I'm expecting that she will have that all sorted by next week so that me and the programming team can properly get started with our job.

(Since this was said on a voice chat, I have no evidence of the conversation besides what I had said sometime after the fact)

Reflection

This week has been very turbulent for pretty much every department except for the programmers. While everyone else is sorting out what they want to do there really isn't very much the programmers will be able to get started on until at least some things, like mechanics and the gameplay loop, are set in stone. So the next week or so will still likely be quite inactive on my end. It doesn't help that my request to immediately set up the Unity project was denied, as it would've helped me set up a proper workstation for rapidly prototyping the ideas being thrown around by designers.

Additionally, I would just like to comment on the use of a piece of software, Discord.

Discord is by no means a professional tool that I doubt is used much if at all in the industry, but seeing as this is a project in which a portion of our team (including half the leads) is 103 miles away, we need a way to quickly be able to communicate as if we were in the same room. Like it or not, Discord will help alleviate a few of those communication barriers, though I can imagine that some problems with conduct may surface as Discord is very much a casual environment, and some people may get ahead of themselves a little bit. Overall, I will be using Discord to communicate with certain team members as if they were in the same room as me.

That is all that I think needs to be said on this blog post, at least without making it ten thousand words long anyway. Thank you for reading and I hope you stick around for the rest of this project