Being Adaptable to Change
A project management advice that everyone should follow
When change occurs too many times, we tend to get overwhelmed and frustrated. Working on our Video Game Clone project, there was never a constant vision of the final product. However, we also had a goal in mind at the very beginning which consisted of various possibilities that we hoped to achieve. Due to a number of different limitations and unforeseen time constraints, however, we had to limit our goals and aim to meet deadlines rather than the initially desired highest quality standards for the project. This was as a result of being overly ambitious at the start of the project and this meant that we needed to make various changes for us to get the project completed. Change is inevitable, therefore, managing and being adaptable to change is vital for every project management.
One of the biggest changes we had to make for the game “Scorched Earth” was the landscape. Scorched Earth is a turn-based battle in 2D terrain, in which tanks adjusts the angle and power of their turret before firing. Each shot destroys the terrain creating a gap in its place. The terrain, along with the tanks, can fall down when a gap is created. This was one if not the most difficult features of the game that we needed to implement. However, we overlooked this problem and left it halfway through the project in order to move on.
During the first few weeks, we worked on implementing the more obvious physics features of the game. At this point, we still had no idea what visual style we wanted the game to have. Given that we still had a lot of mechanic implementation to do, we used a tank sprite that my partner initially designed. We decided to use it for the prototype until we needed to change it.
However, when I started implementing turret rotation, there was a couple of issues. In order for this feature to work, I needed a separate tank body and its turret. The sprite had to be redesigned to adapt to this feature. It was easy to disregard later features that required changes to the sprites and art style while working on the prototype. We needed to be able to adapt to these changes as we progress.
When we finally developed a functioning tank, complete with mechanics and features, we decided to face our biggest fear, the landscape issue. However we eventually realised that the software is incapable of creating the landscape feature as we initially devised. This software limitation led us to create a new “style” of the game. We made the landscape into a 2D cuboid terrain. However, this didn't fix our art style indecision issue, it just made it worse! Now we had to think of a tiled landscape that will look appealing.
Implementing features meant changes to the art style. We altered a significant portion of our art style to suit the new tiled landscape. I also had to cope with an unexpected change that my partner decided halfway through the project. She had designed the menu art and changed the title of Scorched Earth into Tank Wars! This introduced a whole new themed art style into the game and we had to redesign the Tank sprites entirely to suit the Space theme. We also had to deal with the terrain styling again and experimented with a lot of Outer space looking landscape.
All in all, we had to adapt and re-adapt our art style due to indecision and limitations discovered during the design process. Constant change meant we had to be able to quickly switch the direction of our workflow. Communication about these changes was also crucial especially when working on a team. Deciding on the changes, however big or small, should be discussed within the team to avoid chaos. People often fear change or fear to change themselves. It is important to remember that change is necessary in most cases for us to meet our goals. Management of change is probably one of the key aspects of project management and I highly recommend people not to limit themselves with one possible outcome. A project can drift into different direction in a matter of time and we should all be prepared when this situation occurs.
