This project got off to a pretty rocky start. Our task was to create a game that helped teach Shoshone children their language and culture in an effort to prevent it from dying out. The caveat however is the clients naturally wanted something fun, and language games ain't fun. The initial idea was a collection of minigames on the facebooks tied together by some Ville style overworld. The minigame collection idea persisted throughout the entire project, but the overworld went through some pretty dramatic changes. Eventually we just settled on a large explorable area with various hidden things and minigames to discover.
Once we settled on an idea and our producer got over his fear of potentially offending the Shoshone people... well somewhat got over his fear, everything went pretty smoothly. This is the first project I've ever worked on where I had very little communication with my fellow engineer about the actual coding process and it worked out fine. He was in charge of making the overworld and I was in charge of developing two minigames. He did his job, I sent him mine and he integrated them into the game. Our artist was kind of MIA most of the development cycle, but he was very good about steering the game in a certain direction and getting art assets to us in time. Well, in time is up for debate, but I felt we had enough time to get everything in there, after all, it all did get in there.
Because of the scope of this project, we actually had the ability to iterate on our prototypes, which was kind of neat. I went through about four reasonably different versions of the hunting game before deciding on the final version we presented, and the overworld as I mentioned above, while only being prototyped once was overhauled multiple times. The fighting game was more of a wash because programming fighting mechanics, much less enemy fighting AI was completely new territory for me. It ended up being fun, but pretty mundane once you realize what you actually have to do to win. It definitely still needs a little work.
Overall the project went smoothly, no real complaints.
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