Capstone Design Reflection #1
Getting an initial concept with a team is usually an interesting process. It’s the first real time the team goes head to head with itself (in my experience thus far) with any real stakes. You often have different ideas for what kind of game you want to make let alone which idea you want to go for.
(Invincible) -- arguing over game concepts
This increases with the number of people on your team, and the number of people on said team who share roles. If you have multiple designers like I have, you may disagree on aspects of level design, mechanics and systems, and design documentation. Similarly for artists you can get arguments over art style and aesthetic. When concepting games you can also have arguments over what a game concept would entail for work and the above, and it’s all hypothetical.
For my team at least, we had the benefit of knowing the team roster the semester beforehand, this gave us the summer to pitch initial ideas and bounce them off each other. It also gave us a head start when we began to whittle down our list of pitched ideas into a short list of games to concept for in our initial steps of development.
(Shadow of War) -- forging an agreeable game concept
From the start we knew that as a team we wanted to include elements of romance/dating sims and as a result a lot of the pitched game ideas had at minimum, some elements thereof. I myself was less enthused for this specific route and so I did my best to A: pitch non-dating games, and B: pitch dating games that I wouldn’t mind working on. I incorporated elements that I believe work well with dating sim aspects. When the time finally came to choose three to move forward with, our team gauged scope, and other viability factors of each of of our ideas and come down to the required three options. This went fairly smoothly, and I believe this again to be due to our time to mull over these ideas over the summer, and our larger than usual team size made some concepts easier to envision as a capstone project.
After narrowing our sights on three distinct concepts, we split our team into two smaller teams to explore the two concepts we’d worked on least, and gave the third concept, one we’d designated as the most “worked on” over the summer in terms of thought given, time to sit.
(Dramatic Crossroads)
During this time we were able to move faster with smaller “team sizes” which really allowed us to explore what we might be able to do if we had more time to work on each of the concepts. Splitting the team in half also meant there was only one of the role on the minor teams, myself as the designer, and each of the programmers and artists could just go by themselves and not need to worry about coming to an agreement on every detail. This really worked because it let us go at our own pace in discovering the possibilities for these ideas.
(Sprinting Start)
However, at the end of our week long concepting for the two ideas, we went back to our third game and decided it had the best prospects, this decision was unanimous with the team, and I so far believe it to have been the right choice.
So, to reiterate, as a team we were able to balance our individual wants with the team’s wants by A: having the space to work it out over a longer period of time B: splitting up to divide and conquer on smaller ideas, and as a final addition, C: being able to choose our capstone teams in the first place rather than being placed on teams, meaning that we were able to choose team members with similar skills and strengths for what types of games we want to make.
While we still have a ways to go for making this game (hopefully) production ready, I believe we are on track to do that, and that when we do, we will also be prepared to onboard more people and move forward with a cohesive design vision.