This development log is dedicated to the Group Project assignment for Professional practice: Development and Production for the game ReBirth with myself, Karl Duke and Joe Skow. All references will be at the bottom of the page.
There is a navigation bar for the page under the title. Click on each one and it will take you to each category
Individual Role
These roles I had chosen allowed me to cover the weak spots of my team mates given I was the only student for games design on this team and we had chosen to do a game concept/demo. When we had done the psychometric testing, I had found that I am quite flexible and can cover a lot of leadership roles and key roles which made it quite useful for supporting Karl and joe especially on a game design standpoint for organisation and design for the project goal.
I felt like it fit quite well with the team as Karl had arisen to taking a major role of team leader, the conductor. While joe was more of a whistler being Karl’s second. I helped bridge some ideas together for what all three of us are capable of doing and help throw ideas out there and get some fast and solid ideas what we can do for our project concept as keep things clear for people to understand. This helped lead in to our planning and schedules as well as our main communication and how we would go about our contributions.
During my contributions of helping the workflow of the group I managed to help karl understand some coding with unity which he could later transfer to other projects and work despite him originally not liking the topic of work.
During beginning the project, we quickly came up with a rough idea of what we wanted to do, from there we had started looking at what the other people in the group are capable and comfortable with doing within the team group of TTTBYARBHG, I feel like I had potential for a very flexible role however my titles given/chosen were as follows. Level Designer, Gameplay Conceptualist, 3D Modeller, QA Tester
Organisational Skills, Schedules & Planning
When we started talking in person about this project, we had realised we will need a foundation for communication outside of the university. As we had different ways of doing things we had opted to go for a couple of ways of communication. As we couldn’t keep meeting on university campus, we did opt to go for an online communication method and this would also allow us to keep track of our work and contributions without being in a centralized location.
Trello
Karl had taken the time to set us up a Trello page which is a professional tool often used in games industries for helping visualize what work we had and who would be in charge of what. We didn’t use it as much as discord in the end however during our foundation stages it was a very useful and efficient took for managing work.
Discord
With Karl being the team leader, he did handle the creation of some of this group communication methods, however I had taken a bit of a lead in communications and organisation, being the oboe guy of the group, I felt like setting up a centralized easy access communication would be key for our success together. I had made a discord server which we would then go to show our progress in channels I had made for clarity and keeping up with each other’s work and feedback.
Discord was our main way of keeping in touch with one another for meetings, feedback and scheduling. I had set up some more advanced features for the server which Karl took the opportunity to use to schedule events and group calls.
Cloud Storage
We had another means way to share work to one another and that was through the usage of google drive; in which we could exchange our resources. Karl was the main user of this as I often used discord to put my resources for ease of access and simplicity for my own work flow.
Leadership and teamwork
Jaydon Parker (Myself)
Being the only student on a games design course in the group, I had taken up some of the main foundations of making our game such as the level design. I was able to help support the Joe and Karl in the concepts and creation for the game project as they are skilled in digital design and weren’t familiar with the work flow and requirements for making a game. In the start of our game we had some controversial topics at hand and I worked with Karl to alter these without affecting the story and gameplay elements for our project.
Karl (Kaes) Duke
Karl had a very key role in our group as he was the team leader as well as the public relation meaning they would be the key face of the group for presentations and key point for conversation. Especially during our early stages of the game where we had to justify some of our decisions the group had made and the route we would be going for our game. Along with this Karl had took up head writer for the project meaning any stories or dialogue we would need, Karl would be in charge of. He also worked with myself and joe for 3D work being a texture artist as he was familiar with the tools at hand and comfortable to do so.
Joe Skow
Joe was selected as our second in command behind Karl. Working closely with both of myself and Karl we had some key discussions which lead to the development of our concept of the game before we started working on it. Along with this Joe was very comfortable working with Zbrush and was a valuable team member for the creation of our assets and concepts.
Overall I feel our teamwork was very solid and we had a good practice of our team work and leadership.
Design process
For my side of the work I had worked with the group to create a mind map for the initial design of the game and what we would be looking to be including in to the game itself.
The images below are all original work and all my contributions into the ReBirth Game
All My Contributions For The ASsignment
Original Hotel Concepts
Second Design For Hotel
Third and Final Hotel Design
My models for the hotel and Final product
All Texturing Of Models Credited To Team Member Karl Duke
Tech-Demo Of Finished Project. Player Speed 2.2x Faster Than Finished Game.
Packaged Product + Video in Box.
https://universityofhull.box.com/s/wqel2c3g25p5i6wl53uv0kqldop49ru4
Reflection
During the time working on the ReBirth team project i feel like it has been a very valuable learning experience and that the three of us have worked very well together for several reasons.
All of us feel like it has been a pleasant experience and I couldn’t of hoped for a better and more supportive team to be apart of. There might have been times stepping out of comfort zones for things and it has been beneficial for everyone in the group.
Everyone in the group was always very inclusive supporting one another every step of the way through our discord server we had setup very early on. This helped overcome potential issues or help one another develop skills for different things if they felt like they were lacking in the process of making the game project. Whilst working in this group I felt like I had learnt several things nad refined a set of skills I had already learnt. I feel a lot more comfortable in using unreal and I am glad that we chose to make a game project, as I am sure the others are too. I learnt quite a lot of management and helping the team work along for the project being the only games design student in the team.
Despite some issues along the way, mostly being presentations for my personal one. Aswell as concerns about some things mostly being work balance which I had struggled with all the way to the end of this module, I did find the presentations very draining per week. Despite this we all managed to get the work done and to a good standard for a game technical demo
Reference List
Graduate Providence, 2022. Graduate Hotel irmages. [image] Available at: https://www.graduatehotels.com/providence/ [Accessed 29 April 2022].