Malcolm Bornmann PPJ 09

Personal Postmortem

Three Things That Went Right

  • Education. This term allowed me to explore level design. Through design parameters, class discussions, and creative permission from the team, I was able to gain both practical and theoretical knowledge in this area. I intend to design levels for Senior Project, so I’m glad that I was able to use Workshop as a training ground for that. I also learned how to use GitHub and bettered my skills in Unity. The fatal flaw in the curriculum for my cohort is a lack of training in version control and game engines. Luckily this is being fixed for younger generations of GDAP, but in terms of my education specifically, this class helped me become more comfortable using these software programs that are extremely relevant to my major and eventual career.

 

  • Taking on Responsibility. Our team did not initially have an Art Director for the first few weeks and desperately needed one. Jake McKenna and I both stepped up to take on that role in addition to our chosen roles of being Level Designers. Since our game is level-driven, our roles as Level Designers dictated the content of the game, while our roles as Art Directors brought a much needed structure to our game development. By taking on these responsibilities, we were able to dish out weekly tasks and ensure a finished product. This required Jake and I to stay organized, maintain a consistent artistic vision, and communicate with the team. These are soft skills that are necessary to have when being a leader. My career goal is to become a Creative Director, so it was nice to grow those soft skills.

 

  • We Made A Functioning Game. This is something to be really proud of normally, but especially during the current state of the world. We all were working from home in different time zones and had reduced access to our Drexel software and hardware. This was on top of a global health crisis, economic hardships, protests against racial injustice, and various personal tragedies. In addition, we had other school work to consider, Senior Project being one of them, as well as the huge learning curves that a project like this naturally brings. To produce what we did under all of that stress, is truly an amazing accomplishment!

 

Three Things That Went Wrong

  • Communication. The most frustrating moments as a leader on this project was when my teammates failed to attend meetings or message in the Discord throughout the week (especially if they were @’d in the Discord). This made it hard to provide feedback and left many in the dark on the progress of the game. My teammates would communicate the most the day before class when they were rushing to get things done. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have the adrenaline rush the night before, but it certainly creates an unhealthy and stressful working environment that could easily be avoided if people just spent a few minutes sending updates in the chat or managing their time throughout the week. Lack of communication leads to miscommunication and is the direct reason for why many issues occurred in this project.

 

  • Narrative. We went into this project wanting to create a campaign with a story that consisted not only of unique gameplay, but multiple characters across multiple levels that were all well-developed and interesting. This was a big ask, especially since there didn’t seem to be a lot of narrative planning during Workshop 1. We entered Workshop 2 with a blank canvas, which was daunting and quickly brought upon issues of timeline. We had to spend the first few weeks in pre-production, conducting research, fleshing out ideas, and experimenting before we could even produce anything. This caused us to quickly fall behind in production to the point where we had to scale down the amount of narrative in the game just so we could focus on making playable levels. This then put us in a weird gray area where sometimes the narrative we developed would dictate level creation while other times the narrative would have to change depending on the assets made. Our narrative in the game is nowhere near as strong as originally intended.


  • Quality Control. Though Jake and I did make mood boards and tried to maintain somewhat of an artistic vision, we quickly discovered that 3D modelers have their own perspectives on what 3D modeling means in addition to having varying levels of comfort with the skill set in general. Throughout the term, there were inconsistencies in modeling styles, many assets needed to be recreated due to either too much detail or not enough detail, and we often had assets that took a while to be UV’d. This project is a learning experience, so we can’t fault people for trying, but this definitely slowed down the production process. Next time I would want the asset creation team to be all on the same page with modeling style and who does what in the pipeline before anything gets created. Setting expectations would avoid many problems.

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