I’m still trying to figure out how exactly I would do this project if I had to start it all over again.
We were a large team that was very excited about taking on a big project, working a lot, and coming away with a relatively polished slice. Unfortunately, we ended up biting off more than we could chew. We worked really hard, ran into tons of hiccups in implementation that piled up until we had to pivot to a smaller-scale project in a different engine (Twine instead of Unity).
I think we also got wrapped up in the idea of getting into Unity RIGHT AWAY, since we knew that getting things built would be difficult. Once we had met a few times and nailed down a direction, we started splitting up tasks and completed work individually. However, I think we did ourselves a disservice by not getting a solid prototype created first. My job was writing dialog and creating narrative, and I found it difficult to create much concrete without having a clear picture of the game’s mechanics. Frequently our group was on the same page conceptually, but I wonder whether leaving lots of unanswered questions about the game made it difficult to complete work individually. Our most productive moments were times when we met up to work, but of course we could only do that so many times as busy Stanford students. I think we would have been more successful if we had sketched out our system in more detail from the start.
At the end of the day, my guess is our real downfall was improper prioritization. We started building, writing, and creating art before we had designed our mechanics. One thing I’d certainly do differently would be to start from a solid analog prototype before moving to digital. That way, scoping down doesn’t have to be an enormous pivot.
