I have a lot of things to say about Aztech. I should start it off by saying, for the record - I got everything I wanted that year. I wanted to try my hand and running a big team (by DigiPen standards) which I did, I got the team members I wanted, we went with the concept I wanted, everything was coming up me. And we started off really well - by the time winter break had rolled around mine was one of the two big game teams in that year that hadn't fallen to pieces, we were excited about the game, and we had the highest grade so far in the class for our project - a 104%. The team disbanded for winter break, and a month later we reconvened having had taken a complete and total break from the game. To be honest, I think that was part of what went wrong second semester - at least for me.
When spring semester of 2013 called us back into DigiPen's halls the playing field had entirely changed. The other big teams that had fallen apart had put themselves back together again and were hard at work on their projects already - while we were just starting to get back into the swing of things. To add to our woes all six of our artists moved into what's almost universally agreed to be one of the hardest semesters in the school and were completely swamped by class work. Since artists on DigiPen teams don't get course credit for their contributions, they couldn't do much for the game after that point as they had to focus on their classes. Everything was just tossed on it's head in the course of a week for us. I tried everything in my repertoire of tools and skills to get the team it's old velocity back - we had stand up meetings as often as possible, lead meets, one on ones (a confidential meeting between myself and one other team member) team on ones, SPRINT planning, you name it. Yet for weeks we were struggling.
They say the difference between a good leader and a great one is good leaders tell the team where to go while great ones drive them there. I felt that for all my effort, for some reason I still wasn't driving. We were talking and planning and doing nothing so we'd go back to talking and planning and just spinning our wheels for days. So with all my tools and knowledge exhausted I did the last thing I could do - I asked for help. It ultimately came in the form of Pat Bulman and Rachel Rutherford. They helped guide me through the rest of spring 2013. I started by cutting the fat. Of our six artists, I only kept two of them on call, Alex Ginter and Brett Linne, as they had the most time. I wound up dividing some of the devs into the 'core group' - a small group of four devs I knew had time and were reliable (Bryce Nelson, Stephen Manley-Buser, Jarrod Sherwin and Sean Hughes). The brunt of the team's efforts fell on them while the more swamped team members had a bit more breathing room. Instead of putting a lot of effort into schnazzy polish with the camera and level editor we rescoped and focused on the core features of the game that needed improvement - the traps switching in and out and the player's abilities (specifically, we added in a bunch of hidden homing effects so that players succeeded more often then they might deserve to). We redirected graphics entirely, doing a shift from mapping to working on particles and glow effects. After all, if we couldn't' have an artist make the game look good we had to fake it as much as possible.
We had to cut and hack and slice away at a LOT of things we wanted to add, perhaps too much. By the time we were done cutting many of the features the team was excited about working on had to go, and I feel that in the end that really hurt our motivation and perhaps the speed at which we worked. But I stand by my choices. I felt like I had finally stopped telling and started driving again, and it felt good. In the end, we got where we needed to go. The game worked, it looked decent and was fun to play. But it still haunts me that Aztech is nowhere near as amazing as it could have been. I feel like in the end my hubris ultimately got the better of me. When things started to take a turn for the worse my pride made me feel that I had to figure it out on my own, to prove I was better then the other producers in my year. Like for some reason, if I went and asked for advice that would make me worse then my classmates when in reality they were asking for help all along. And the game suffered terribly for it - we never really caught up to where we could have been if I'd only swallowed my pride a few weeks earlier. Like I said, I got everything I wanted that year - and I feel like Aztech's success, or lack thereof is my fault as well.
All of the above, of course, does not reflect ill in any way of my team members. Quite the opposite - they made it what it is and are all amazing at what they do: I was just the guy herding cats. Hell if I could do it again I'd still want every last one of them on my team. I threw together a small website for the game: you can check it out and the core team's contact info here.
When spring semester of 2013 called us back into DigiPen's halls the playing field had entirely changed. The other big teams that had fallen apart had put themselves back together again and were hard at work on their projects already - while we were just starting to get back into the swing of things. To add to our woes all six of our artists moved into what's almost universally agreed to be one of the hardest semesters in the school and were completely swamped by class work. Since artists on DigiPen teams don't get course credit for their contributions, they couldn't do much for the game after that point as they had to focus on their classes. Everything was just tossed on it's head in the course of a week for us. I tried everything in my repertoire of tools and skills to get the team it's old velocity back - we had stand up meetings as often as possible, lead meets, one on ones (a confidential meeting between myself and one other team member) team on ones, SPRINT planning, you name it. Yet for weeks we were struggling.
They say the difference between a good leader and a great one is good leaders tell the team where to go while great ones drive them there. I felt that for all my effort, for some reason I still wasn't driving. We were talking and planning and doing nothing so we'd go back to talking and planning and just spinning our wheels for days. So with all my tools and knowledge exhausted I did the last thing I could do - I asked for help. It ultimately came in the form of Pat Bulman and Rachel Rutherford. They helped guide me through the rest of spring 2013. I started by cutting the fat. Of our six artists, I only kept two of them on call, Alex Ginter and Brett Linne, as they had the most time. I wound up dividing some of the devs into the 'core group' - a small group of four devs I knew had time and were reliable (Bryce Nelson, Stephen Manley-Buser, Jarrod Sherwin and Sean Hughes). The brunt of the team's efforts fell on them while the more swamped team members had a bit more breathing room. Instead of putting a lot of effort into schnazzy polish with the camera and level editor we rescoped and focused on the core features of the game that needed improvement - the traps switching in and out and the player's abilities (specifically, we added in a bunch of hidden homing effects so that players succeeded more often then they might deserve to). We redirected graphics entirely, doing a shift from mapping to working on particles and glow effects. After all, if we couldn't' have an artist make the game look good we had to fake it as much as possible.
We had to cut and hack and slice away at a LOT of things we wanted to add, perhaps too much. By the time we were done cutting many of the features the team was excited about working on had to go, and I feel that in the end that really hurt our motivation and perhaps the speed at which we worked. But I stand by my choices. I felt like I had finally stopped telling and started driving again, and it felt good. In the end, we got where we needed to go. The game worked, it looked decent and was fun to play. But it still haunts me that Aztech is nowhere near as amazing as it could have been. I feel like in the end my hubris ultimately got the better of me. When things started to take a turn for the worse my pride made me feel that I had to figure it out on my own, to prove I was better then the other producers in my year. Like for some reason, if I went and asked for advice that would make me worse then my classmates when in reality they were asking for help all along. And the game suffered terribly for it - we never really caught up to where we could have been if I'd only swallowed my pride a few weeks earlier. Like I said, I got everything I wanted that year - and I feel like Aztech's success, or lack thereof is my fault as well.
All of the above, of course, does not reflect ill in any way of my team members. Quite the opposite - they made it what it is and are all amazing at what they do: I was just the guy herding cats. Hell if I could do it again I'd still want every last one of them on my team. I threw together a small website for the game: you can check it out and the core team's contact info here.