Pitch and Postmortem (with video!)

We wrapped up this week with, what we felt, was a successful pitch. Monday's pitch felt a little flat, so we went and improved on a few of its deficits over the next couple days. In the end, our game showed much better in prototype then it did during the initial pitch, which is something I need to work on (more on that below). However, without further ado, here is the trailer I cut together for our game:

Afterwards we held a postmortem to ascertain where we ended up. Here's how our timeline ended up:

It takes a fairly obvious shape (almost a sine wave) when you think about it: hitting a few lows before achieving a decent number of highs. It also turns out I learned a few things talking about the project. Something I thought we did very well with (and the rest of the team agreed) was our design meetings. Design needs to be done quick in this format, but we all felt that we were able to be flexible, compromise, and combine our respective ideas in something that was tailored to the client. No one felt like they were slighted by design decisions or left out of the loop. Our Facebook group probably went a long way in helping communication, especially early on when we weren't sure who had texting or a chat client.

After the design highs we hit a few lows. Looking back, we all severely underestimated the difficulty of the project. Initially, we felt that, at tops, a week would be needed to get the basic prototype together. However, the engineers felt flustered by the lack of documentation for Moai, and it took a week just to get ducks in a row. Something to look at in the future would be to schedule smaller tasks the first week so as to allow the engineers to grow accustomed to the engine and learn some basics while churning out a few easier tasks. This might allow us to prioritize a little better as well. Tasks we thought would take a few hours ended up taking a couple days, so knowing what those are and tackling them early would save some stress later on. As a producer, I definitely need to attack issues with art outsourcing (or sound outsourcing) earlier. It seemed like I would have plenty of time to get some things done, but there were always unexpected road blocks. It turned out alright this time, but next time it might not, and having a few extra days to get things in order might make all the difference.

Towards the end, everything came together. We got things we needed done as the engineers worked with a better understanding of the engine, and art finally came together thanks to Sagar. I made an initial pitch that swung far too plain on the pendulum, but came back pretty well (with the help of the team) for the final pitch on Wednesday. We got a playable demo working, on both pc and iOS. Once we got a firm grasp on the project the last week, while hectic, was much better planned out. In the future, I'll be looking to get that mountain climbed a little earlier. Crunch time isn't fun for anyone.

The last thing I'll say is that I'm sorry to see the team break up. As a first experience, I don't think I could have asked for a better team than Sagar, Triston, and Yuntao. All of them are very capable engineers and good designers. At least now I'll have some engineers to ask for second opinions (and maybe snag some artwork from Sagar if I need to).