Wow I thought you guys did well last jam, but this is incredible. The art, music, level design, all of it is amazing. This is some of your best work yet.
Also how were you guys able to create something like this with such a large team? Although communication and leadership isn't a category you guys would receive 5 stars on that front as well. Amazing work guys :)
Thank you so much! Your game for GMTK and last game jam are great, both had very innovative mechanics imo. For managing a large team, I can only speak on the programming side. We use Github to manage our file history and enable easy collaboration. To minimize merge conflicts or other issues, people can "claim" which files/folders they need to access and change, at which point no one else will try to use them as well. This keeps us generally aware of what everyone is doing, while giving us the freedom to work on an issue independently. If you want to talk more, me and other members of the team would be happy too.
Thank you, yes I would love talk more! Our team also used GitHub, but we sometimes had conflicts when pushing stuff. We tried to solve this by one person working on the main game and the other working on making prefabs. Also based on what you said, it seems like on the last day someone was in charge of combining it all and taking everyone’s files and making the game. And since the game is well balanced, how much time did you spend playtesting it? Anyways I would love to chat and exchange ideas of how to manage a team :)
Hi! I can talk a little bit about the playtesting and balancing aspect. For the team, I set a deadline of the of the day on that Friday for us to have a decent, playable build on itch, in order to leave us about 1.5 days for playtesting and polishing. The valuable playtesting mainly came from the non-programming team members, so basically just the people who were working on the game but hadn't actually played or seen it before. In addition to that, I forced every level in the game to go through multiple revisions, playtesting and providing feedback myself starting on the very first day.
As for the teamwork part, I can provide a little bit more detail. One important thing we had was a requirement for all programmers actively working on the game to be in one discord VC at all times. This helped facilitate the aforementioned claim system, since it was as simple as asking something like, "hey is anyone working on level select right now?" "no" "ok then no one touch level select." Despite all that, we certainly had merge issues. Most were pretty benign, some resulted in people having to redo work, and some just straight up deleted entire levels (those were very unfortunate, we had to pause all work and revert commits). On the last day, we didn't actually have much to put together since we had been assembling the game as we went (one huge help is that the game is levels-based meaning it's really easy to split up files and avoid conflicts). In fact, the game had been pretty much assembled since its first itch build (on the Friday night). Instead, what we spent the last day doing was having everyone do all the polish we could. Most of the team worked on doing final level touchups and decorations (and one person did SFX) while MrPuffyWuff and I (the experienced programmers in the group) worked on everything else the game needed to be done (work was allocated like this because we didn't want one of the inexperienced programmers to make a mistake on the last day and break everything). Specifically, on the last day leading up to the deadline, I made the ending screen, player death animation, and a few various other things (such as the sand falling sound effect getting louder the less time you have), and MrPuffyWuff made the intro cutscene and reverted a buggy commit which deleted 3 levels (he was up late the night before, I was not). So yeah, we generally try to avoid only putting the game together at the end and instead we put it together as we go. Anyway oops this a really long reply lol.
Thank you so much for the feedback. And dont worry that the text is really long, I would rather read more about successful game design and project management than less. The funny thing is is that we had similar working styles (with using discord and Github). but the main difference was the constant communication by staying on call, which greatly helped coordinate your team. Our goal was to get our MVP finished by Friday, but with confusion and miscommunication we ran into a lot of conflicting code and errors. This delayed us and greatly reduced the amount I also really liked how you guys used the artists as the playtesters since they have little experience with the gameplay, but are also the typical reviewers for a game jam.
Overall, it seems like the best way to coordinate a team for a game jam is to:
1) Have clear designations of what components people are working one before even starting to make the game
2) Have some way of constantly communicating with your team (this can be through a call, working in person, ect.)
3) Have 1-2 people spend time combining all the files (to prevent conflicts)
4) have people who have not worked on the game play components (artists, musicians, ect.) be the ones to playtest the game
Thank you so much for this information. I will relay this back to my team to have a smoother workflow. If there is any other teamwork or coordination methods that you guys used to make such an impressive game I would love to know. This doesnt even apply to coding as I noticed in both this and last game you guys mixed both drawings and pixel art in you game, and I would love to know about the thought process behind that.
Anyways I am planning on doing Brackeys jam so hopfully I see you guys there. If not, hope to see you guys in the next jam :)
Hi, as one of the art leads, I would like to add on to what the programming leads said. This will read more like a description of our process this jam including our downfalls. That said, I'm recently promoted and I couldn't participate in the last jam. The other art lead (youzicha08) had extenuating curcumstances this jam that prevented him from working durring the same time as the other artists, thus I had to organize the art team kinda impromptu, and there were some issues that persisted through the development process.
For example, we initially decided on a few color palletes and general references, but later on in development, this proved to be an inorganized system as me and some of the other experienced artists had to constantly manage the others to make sure everything was going ok. I eventually made an addition to the task planning doc where we laid out the color palletes and references used. This helped to unify the team on solid art direction but I would still like to improve on it next for next time we do a jam. Anyway, as we progressed, we realized that we didnt need some of the color palletes and just lowering the saturation and darkening one would work pretty good for the background/darker areas.
Now for a brief review of who actually made what: For the title screen, we just had one rly good artist (sssoiree) do the screen and buttons. Later, MrPuffyWuffy animated the various parts of the screen to give a more fluid feel (ex: moving the hourglass side to side, and rotating the gear). Youzicha08 did the ending screen (and paralax background) over the course of the whole jam. Overall the jam was surprisingly quick to finish from the art and music perspective (both teams were done with essential works around maybe the 2 day point), and we had some free time at the end so for the last day or so, I worked on the base of the image, then I passed it on to some people who are good at rendering for them to fully finish (froqqo and sssoiree). Following that, on the final day, MrPuffyWuffy made the animation with the image we produced. I produced the majority of the tileset, focusing on the static parts, and the rest of the artists took the non-static parts, as well as various msc tasks such as in-game menu, rats, player, etc.
Overall, I found it really helpful to have a set color pallete restriction (for most art pieces) and to have an experienced art person avalible in vc for critique. Also its nice to have an artist with around a 12 hour shifted sleep schedule because you can pass unfinished artwork onto them to work on durring the night. I didn't do my best in leading the team this jam, and I hope to work more in tandem with Youzicha08 in the future. I will create a format for a style guide for use in later jams aswell. I also need to be more direct in critiques to make sure all assets adhere to the theme the first time they are rendered. I'm also really thankful to one of the programmers/artists (Theophylaktos) for helping implement my rambling suggestions for level decor into the game.
Hello Sashasauce. Thank you very much for providing insights into the how the art was made. The organization of the art direction seemed to be similar to how the programming team handled communication, in that you guys had a clear separation of who did what and constant communication throughout the jam. Having someone with a shifted schedule seemed to help facilitate this separation of work. I showed this to my art team so that we can improve the art in our next jam. Anyways, thank you a lot for the advice :)
