New Teammates and New Design

Well we're finally all settled on teams, and we ended up growing to more than double our original team size. It's been an interesting week.

On Monday we decided to have a meeting (with dinner, since food seems to bring people to meetings) at Brianne's house, just to allow anyone to get a feel for what we want to do with the game and how we plan on changing it with the new team size. This served a second purpose for us to get an idea of who is seriously looking at joining our team so we could begin figuring out how the game will change. We got a pretty decent turnout, check it out:

Post-dinner discussion and brainstorming.

These are also posted on our Vinyl game blog, which you should check out here. Overall the night went really well, and everyone who showed up ended up joining our team (and we pulled in one more who didn't show up).

On Tuesday the teams were finally formed. We gained three more engineers (Yuntao, Wang, and Cody), two more producers (Zeph and JJ), and an artist (Alice). This put us at 11 team members, with two music consultants from the Ph.D program on campus. We rearranged our desks, making a nice, open environment where we can all turn around and talk to each other, check it out:

I purposely asked to not have all of the engineers and producers to be grouped together (we only have one artist so that's not a problem for her, haha). I wanted us to have some cross-talk, where people know what everyone else is doing, and where anyone can chime in with a great idea or helpful comment at any time. We run everything in a pretty flat management style, so having this open communication should only help to encourage that.

Thursday was the first actual day of getting down to work. We spent around three hours brainstorming. Given our new team size and new team members, I wanted to stress the importance of their buy-in to our ideas and wanted to make sure that everyone had a say in what new ideas we were going to accomplish together. The original five of us from the prototype didn't want anyone to feel left out, or like they could just latch on to our game and ride our coattails to the finish line. This turned out to be a lot of work, but it was completely worth it. I think by the end of this process we will have a very cohesive, committed team. First, here's some shots of our whiteboard brainstorming session:

Brainstorm!

 We accomplished quite a great deal in our brainstorm. The first issue we tackled was quite the big one: the PC v. Mobile debate. A lot of the feedback from the industry panel, as well as faculty and peers at the university, is that Vinyl feels like a mobile game. Our team, for the most part (new members included) respectfully disagree. We agree that if we were an indie studio looking to make money then mobile is the way to go, no question. But as students, we need to prove concepts and explore ideas, not make money. If I wanted to make money I wouldn't have quit my well-paying job to donate a sizable chunk of money to the University of Utah for the privilege of making games on their beautiful campus. However, we needed to, as a team, be able to defend our position and seriously take into consideration what mobile brings us versus what the PC platform brings to the table. We landed at the idea that we will make a decision to pursue a mobile port of our game come the end of this semester, when we enter alpha, and we'll lead with the PC.

The engine debate was another doozy. Unity is great for people like myself. I have a decent programming background and I want to make games quickly. For game programmers looking to get into the industry, Unity is barely worth a resume mention. We had some engineers content with Unity, figuring they get enough noteworthy programming skills in their other classes, some engineers really want to switch to the CryENGINE (which looks amazing and is easier to use than the UDK from what I understand), and even other engineers want to use a sort of roll-your-own engine with the OGRE platform and other middleware. We decided that the engineers would look into different engines over spring break and that we'd come to a decision afterwards.

Other than those two huge debates, we got a lot of the legwork done of discussing new design ideas, bringing back old ones that were thrown our for team-size or scheduling concerns, and then narrowing down to just what our game actually is now. Alice is going to come back in a couple weeks with some awesome art concepts, and we're well prepared to give our presentation the Tuesday after spring break showing our plans for the coming year or so. Good stuff.

Next week is spring break, and we're planning on treating it as such. Now's a good time for people to come back feeling refreshed and ready to work.

See you next time.