Game Design Philosophy - Team Structure

This post about Game Design Philosophy will be about our team structure.

For Selatria, I act as the central focus point for the project, where the different team members would report to me, and with that information/assets, I would pass them onto other sectors of the project. I also have a hand in the game design and programming and story.

The flowchart of team structure for Selatria

While a good feature of this structure that we've created is that we can ensure everyone is on the same page for the project, a big drawback from this structure is that far too much responsibility is placed on one individual. Another big drawback is we did not have much accounted for in terms of marketing.

For this reason, we want to change the structure for future projects we develop in the studio. We're going to try this method which allows us to have more than one project in development at a time.

Tentative Game Development Structure

In the above flowchart, we've separated Overseer and Director. The Director will focus on leading the team and production of the game, the Executive Producer, the Overseer, and Director will talk about the development of the game, and the duties are split. Because of the role and knowledge being separated over three people, no one person is being hit with the brunt of all of the responsibility.

And as mentioned earlier, we now allocate a spot for marketing in the process from the get go. Time and time again, we've underestimated the importance of marketing in the development process, and to fit that into the core of our team will be a good step going forward.

Are you developing a game in a team? What is the structure like in your team? How can we improve ours? Feel free to comment below!


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Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #30

Hey all, Happy New Year! Back with the 30th development log.

With a new year comes a new mission and list of goals for the company.

Goals for 2015:

• After celebrating four years in development, the story/plot and all of the music for Selatria will be finished up, and looking forward to making a lot of progress on the development of cutscenes.
  
  
• One more casting-call for voice actors for the second half of Selatria.
  
  
• Start a new surreal/comedy action/beat-em-up game that I've wanted to work on but never really had time to.
  
  
• Attend E3 with the expanded development team
  
• Giving more talks about game development and our experiences at the studio to CSUSB. I really enjoyed that this year and I'd like to continue that.

In order to fulfill these goals, I'm going to follow the Three C's Plan: Create, Communicate, Collaborate:

• Create - Expand studio days to the weekday afternoons after 4PM beginning later this month. Finish Selatria this year and release it to different game networks. Also evaluate the best performing team members from Selatria and ANTics and merge them to work on a new project beginning this summer.

• Communicate - Develop a fan base. Get the word out of our projects in a more efficient manner. Consolidate the created Whim Independent Studios twitter accounts, sync the posting activities between social media, have something to show for #screenshotsaturday, and bring a Marketing person onto the team to get news about our progress to the right channels, and not repeat the same mistakes.

• Collaborate - Focus on working with others using checklists and defined requirements to work towards a finished product.

This will be a great year for development. Even with the recent setbacks we've encountered, we still have a lot of great things to show you this year.

Until the next development log!





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Selatria Kickstarter is Live!

Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #29

Hey readers and supporters, back with the 29th development log!

It's been a few months since I've last posted about development of Selatria.

Since the last development update posted in September, we've taken a lot of steps in order to update the game and get it ready for a Kickstarter release.

The most important feedback from our initial Kickstarter draft was that the graphics were still RPG Maker default tileset assets. We took a few months to take the designs of the game back to the drawing board. Jennifer was tasked to immediately hop on developing new original scenery assets for the project.

While all of the scenery is not yet complete, and there's still a way to go, we feel we have enough to show what we're capable of doing as a team with our current small budget, and show what we'd like to do if we have even greater resources available. We want to develop more and eventually swap out ALL of the original tileset assets.

Take a look at some of the re-designed trees, grass, and wall-tiles!

 

We also have a new artist on the team, her name is Deborah Groves and she's currently developing new character art, sprites, and expressions for Selatria: Here's a sample of what's to come!

Progress is coming along on a new build of the demo which will launch with the Kickstarter campaign. We've delayed it a few months, but I think we're finally ready, no matter the response it may get! Please look forward to it!

Bonus Picture: We were discussing Hat's role in the later part of the story, and people began doodling their rendition of Hat on the studio whiteboard. Here are the results:



Until the next entry!



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Clarence - Average Jeff - Very accurate representation of my middle school experience

This really summed up my experience at Clement Middle School around 2001-2003 ish. There were four teams, to where the C-Team was the Advanced Placement classes and the other teams were for the average students. It was a very flawed system because of me being bullied and having a terrible social experience at the on-set of middle school, my grades suffered to the point where I tested into the average classes, and was moved there being subjected to even more bullying.

http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/tv_shows/clarence/video/average-jeff-episode.html

Thank you, whoever created this episode/show. I'm glad they could properly show the problems of our grade school education system. Well done

Life/Serious Posts have a new tag

All serious posts before November 16, 2014 are placed here.

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Showed Selatria to Day Job Today

Got to show Selatria at the day job today

Initial thoughts:

Wow, this game has voice acting!
Wow, these voices are good!

I worry about this project way too much, I was getting nervous showing it at all, let alone wondering what the reception would be like.

That being said, there are a lot of fun announcements and introduction of new team members to the project that will be coming tomorrow for the public to see!
"Please look forward to it"