Working on Slime-Boy: Stretched Thin #3

Slime-Boy’s development period can be summarized in one word. Rocky. From the beginning, we always seemed to be just a little bit behind the other groups, whether it be deciding on a concept, to use Unreal or Unity, and getting prototypes made. The word can also be interpreted to also mean the mid-70’s sports film franchise, as even though we were always behind, the determination of the team to see Slime-Boy through pushed us all the way through to the end, gritting our teeth. I, as well as everyone on the team, genuinely loved the concept we chose and felt a little upset that we weren’t able to continue onto Greenlight. While Jen has been a wonderful professor, there’s one thing I disagree with her on. She says that “some teams just don’t mesh” when giving us criticism concerning why we didn’t pass. In my opinion, I think that while there were hiccups along the work path, I could see the soul the team had during meetings and classes. We were all ready to put down what we had and put our all into making this idea work. Perhaps we were seen as being distant in-class in the ending portion due to rocky development and being told we weren’t moving on, but it always felt a lot more alive in meetings. Not having sole producers really messed up our work cycle, and I feel that was a large part of why things weren’t working out. Indeed, there are other teams without producers, but each team handles that differently. While we are still honoring the decision not to show at Greenlight, most team members want to show off what we’ve done at Demo Night. I wish we had time to breathe and really address the problems of our team in a natural way, such as the general disconnect between the “producers” and the rest of the team. Not really a problem with the people themselves, more of just a structure issue. I feel that if the class ended right now, I would consider our efforts to be a failure for this reason. While we created something fun, the structure issues were evident from early on. However, I don’t consider failure to be a bad thing, especially here in Game Studio. I’ve always felt that failure is inevitable with a class as competitive, fast-paced, and crunch-intensive as Game Studio, which I felt was purposefully designed to mimic the fast-paced nature of real development. I can say for certain that all of us have learned a good few things about team structure, scoping, and how to manage a team without a sole producer. I’d say the largest thing I learned was to avoid a disconnect between producers and the rest of the team as well as avoiding having too many producers from the same discipline. Because two of our producers were artists, the game’s art suffered along the development path. Slime-Boy’s model’s inclusion being the prime example of how the art took a hit with how long it took to be put into the game.