How I developed my first game: Project Green Leader
blog·@disbelieve·
0.000 HBDHow I developed my first game: Project Green Leader
<html> <h1> </h1> <h1>How I developed my first game: Project Green Leader</h1> <img src="https://steemitimages.com/DQmbB5PwGERm9RDa9juapuVwiGQgzSrG5c3m4xQwJ5cRRXN/img001.png" /> <p> </p> <h2>Introduction</h2> <div class="pull-right"> <img src="https://steemitimages.com/DQmSMdN8TntMpvaD7DZJr88EHewCzvvSvraWkMC9SJsKHDa/img002.png" /> </div> <p>The past 5 months (January 30th 2017 – May 27th 2017) I was instructed to develop a game using Unity, C# and the Scrum development technique for my computer science education’s “Game Engineering” minor. These 5 months were simply without competition the 5 most stressful months of my life in terms of studying and working. Because of the difficulty of how this project I felt like this is a great story to share for others who are interested to learn about the process of making your own game, where it can go wrong in a project or just doing a project in general. I hope this story will be entertaining and both a good learning experience for those who read it. </p> <h2>Project structure</h2> <div class="pull-right"> <img src="https://steemitimages.com/DQmNnNJYUSpcFSyAfu8Knc881WWZyDcp3mAqHtgyXDYqTPn/img003.png" /> </div> <p>Since the project was created for an education, it was connected with a grading system. In order for me to successfully complete my project I had to give presentations every couple of weeks about the game and pass these presentations with a score of 60/100 or higher. If you failed a presentation you would get one more chance for this presentation on the same day as the next presentation. Failing the same presentation twice meant the end of the project and a delay of 5 months before you get to finish your education. </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <h2>The development team</h2> <p>The size of the project was designed for a group of 4-5 students. At first this wasn’t a problem, because we started the project with 4 people. This lasted for right about 1 week. 1 of my project members found out he had failed his internship of the previous semester, which meant he had to directly quit the current semester and do another internship. What this meant was that the remaining group was already at a disadvantage.</p> <p>This was not the only budget cut Project Green Leader had to endure. At about midway through the project one of my other group members considered the project too stressful and too time consuming. He did not believe in a positive ending to this project, so he decided to quit the project and spend the remaining half semester on a different minor. At this point my project group was reduced to a size of 2 people and we had already fallen far behind on schedule (more of this in later chapters). Even our teachers did not foresee a bright future, which is not something they were holding back on telling us. However, I’m a stubborn individual (and my partner as well) so we decided to continue with the project and finish the project, even if we failed. </p> <h2>Charity client</h2> <div class="pull-left"> <img src="https://steemitimages.com/DQmVsWuvyCYUUqXrmPBw9cGMbPifjzPABzVv6qi7Zez1KRE/img004.png" /> </div> <p>As a part of the project each group had to find their own charity and ask them to be their client. I instantly wanted to ask the WWF, simply because they have a panda logo, but this charity had already been taken by a different group. Anyways, after some researching we decided to ask Greenpeace to be our client and started creating a game concept around this charity. Communication with Greenpeace didn’t exactly go at the speed of light, which meant a couple weeks of working out the concept passed before we finally got to hear that Greenpeace did not want to be our client and we had to find a different charity. </p> <div class="pull-left"> <img src="https://steemitimages.com/DQmNUHbTc1Gizu5cWuxffWRkqLnmPCBZVE1FVskRdnnZWkd/img005.png" /> </div> <p>The result of this was that we decided to find a Dutch charity instead that stands for similar things as Greenpeace and adapt our game concept accordingly. The charity we stumbled upon was “Natuur & Milieu”, but just like Greenpeace this charity responded after a week and told us that they too did not want to be our clients. This is basically the point where we gave up on finding a client and just continued making the game (since our teachers were fine with it). </p> <h2>Game concept</h2> <div class="pull-right"> <img src="https://steemitimages.com/DQmUfvLpmvaxWk1jispjLndStY19i21v7f5xjZSWm9SK2JA/img006.png" /> </div> <p>When deciding a game concept, we came up with a Management Simulation Game in which the player is the leader of an organization and would have to perform various actions and respond to events to reduce the pollution to 0%. When we were still trying to get Greenpeace as our client we wanted this simulation to be about the entire world in which each continent was a region and each ocean was a region as well. This concept interested our teachers and fellow students a lot, but also caused worry by the teachers because of the complexity of the game concept. They did not think it would be realizable in a 5 month period. </p> <div class="pull-left"> <img src="https://steemitimages.com/DQmVWo1Wfyeb4EffzZfsji4BNd9BP1VoDA6KMaKwJfavqEQ/img007.png" /> </div> <p>After the setback of not getting Greenpeace as a client, we decided to change our game concept to something similar. We had the idea of either 1 continent, 1 country or 1 town/village. Because the next charity we contacted (Natuur & Milieu) was a charity for the entirety of The Netherlands we decided to change our game concept to just The <div class="pull-right"> <img src="https://steemitimages.com/DQmTEhKwot2Ex52Hmyp5ZvcBffcVMB5buvPJF8okPHic8ZE/img008.png" /> </div>Netherlands as well. Instead of having around ~10 regions we would now have 4 regions, which were all pretty similar and each region would have 3 sectors. These sectors contain the statistics which the player would need to manipulate. This had become our final game concept and we agreed that no matter what the result with our new client would be, we would not change our game concept. </p> <h2>Development</h2> <img src="https://steemitimages.com/DQmV9XDvKg4CzCZgD3foWRsUo8YyPWk8KMEzHjdFPDv8dtH/img009.png" /> <p>As mentioned in the introduction, we had to implement the Scrum technique when developing our game. A quick summary of what this means Is that we divide our project into several sprints of a certain timeframe and basically make a product within each of these sprints. We had 9 sprints of 2 weeks for our project. Scrum is also a major thing where we went wrong and underestimated in the beginning. The first 3 sprints we barely spent any time on Scrum and the results were very noticeable. Our progress lacked structure and we spent a lot of time each day trying to figure out what we would be doing. From sprint 4 and onwards however, we had gotten a hold of Scrum and our progress increased significantly. </p> <p>We had fallen very far behind because of all the setbacks we had already endured in our project group, our client and Scrum and because of this we were failing our presentations. To give a clear understanding of where we were: we weren’t preparing for the current presentation whenever we had to present, but for the previous one and each time our grade for those second chances was a 60/100 (the minimum to pass). This lasted all the way until our final presentation at May 27th 2017 (which we passed and finished our project successfully). </p> <div class="pull-right"> <img src="https://steemitimages.com/DQmdZpswNkuRVk9ipL2WZVizA3gEhzNDRRbMHpV7equ4qze/img010.png" /> </div> <p>During development we also encountered another mistake we made during the start of the project, which is not checking everything the game needed to have at the end of the project. Our game concept was good and all, but we hadn’t thought about a required feature: an implementation of multiplayer. Because of this we needed to rush a multiplayer within 3 days (I got to see some very nice sunrises from my bedroom window because of this). We did manage to make a multiplayer version, but the lack of an actual thought out concept would leave its mark on the quality of gameplay in this multiplayer version. </p> <h2>Conclusion</h2> <p>Project Green Leader definitely was a project in which I made many mistakes, but I also got to learn a lot from these mistakes and developing my own game. This project has really been the first thing in my life in which I needed to give it full attention from the start, instead of increasingly working harder when reaching the deadline. I came really close to failing my project and having to spend 5 months extra on this minor because of not starting with 100% effort from the beginning. I also learned that you can’t really do anything about some setbacks, but this doesn’t mean you should pretend like it didn’t happen. What I mean with this is that in the future I will “prepare” for unprepared setbacks and be ready to adjust my work accordingly to deal with those setbacks while losing minimal productivity on other parts of the project. It was definitely a huge problem during my problem that I had to keep dedicating time on things that should’ve been finished weeks earlier and this definitely impacted the quality of the game. </p> <p>In the end I only barely passed my project and I am definitely not going to say that Project Green Leader is the best game you’ll ever see, but I’m still very proud of what I made. It is the first real product I developed and I was involved with it from start to finish. I have never put in so many hours in 1 thing in my life as this project and with that came a certain sense of achievement when I finally finished it last week. </p> <p>Thank you for reading this blog and I hope you found it interesting/enjoyable, </p> <p>~Disbelieve </p> https://gyazo.com/9c6fc84008a9a5feb698c5d23fe2dc2f.png </html>