Catch up.

As I mentioned in the last post, Vinyl's had a lot of design changes this semester, but we had a few problems.  These mainly arose because the poor timing of a lot of big events this semester that pretty much killed our teams work flow as well as a someone nebulous design plan.

Mike and I from the beginning wanted the game to be everyone’s game.  We know how not having interest in a project can kill your desire to work on it, we saw a lot of that in cohort 2 and wanted to try to prevent that.  So from the beginning we tried to incorporate everyone into the design process.  This worked fine with a small team, especially since there were only ever two or three of us vocal about any particular mechanic.  Once we blossomed into a team of eleven however, every design meeting became a smorgasbord of new features.  People would talk to whoever was nearby about possible ideas, some would make it through the grapevine and become solid ideas without ever going through official channels.  Having a more organized set up for managing what ideas are new, how they fit in the game and if we want to prototype them would have been helpful.  Perhaps, in addition our daily standup meetings we should have had a daily design meeting where everyone spit out whatever new feature was on their mind and if we wanted it in or not.

Still, with the chaos of half or more of the team being gone for the majority of the alpha phase (if you can even call it that), I feel this sort of nebulous approach kind of worked.  Since there were so many ideas floating around, it gave the engineers that were around plenty of things to tinker with, without having to worry about an actual end goal.  Essentially, we were still in the prototyping phase for most of the semester, which made sense considering we didn’t have the manpower to go into full blown production.

Since we spent so much more time prototyping we now have a lot of cool features available to us loosely linked together.   To help with this nebulous approach to design and since we feel everyone has now had pretty ample say in what the game is, we are in the process of appointing two designers to have final say on features, with a product manager to keep us on track for who our target audience is.  We still want to take everyone’s input seriously, but we need a clear focused goal.  Also, now is a good time to make this transition because we seem to be at a place where everyone is pretty excited about the general vibe of the game, therefore maintaining that feeling should appease the masses… in theory.

Right now we are thinking Mike and I for final say in design, but the decision is still up in the air.  What we want is two designers to sit down and decide what will and will not be part of the final feature list before the summer starts.  This is because we are pretty far behind and if we want to have something presentable by IGF we have all agreed we have to work on this over the summer.  Most of the team will be around and available to work on the project this summer, and they are thankfully the people I have grown to trust to actually get the work done.

If all goes to plan, we should have all the major features, including the few massive undertakings I mentioned earlier, in some sort of alpha stage before school even starts next semester.  Therefore we should be well on our way to having a reasonable beta by October.