Team: TeamNameTaken

The Concept:

Our team wanted to create a Marvel Dr. Strange theme game. To avoid copyright issue, we have to change the character name to Professor Magician. The game is a 3rd person-action-adventure game in which the player will control the main character Professor Magician to fight demons using sorcery.

The target audience for the game aimed to age 16 to 21 who is a high school or college students. We created an ideal person who is a superhero fan and likes the magic theme.

The core mechanics of the game include the skill system, the movement system, and the AI system. The skill system will allow the player character to cast force push and pull skills, duplication, range attack, and teleportation skills. The movement system includes the basic movement of the character and melee attack. The AI system included spawning enemy AI and friendly AI during gameplay.

What Went Right:

Team:

• Asset Management：

  • As the main risk the team established at the beginning of the project, the team agreed that due to the specific theme we had in mind, it will be challenging for us to find the right asset to apply to the project. Luckily, we managed to find the right project asset pack with an acceptable price that we managed to jump right into the project without any extra time spent looking for assets.

• Scope:

  • The team managed to keep the scope under management and adjust to it during the development process. The team was able to react quickly to all the changes such as bug and merge conflict, we managed to resolve the problem relatively smoothly and managed to foresee if any feature is not able to make it into the delivery and push it to a later stage.

• Problem-solving:

  • In the later stages of the project, the more complex the project is becoming, the more problem emerged. The team was able to figure out most of the problems by ourselves and also managed to receive help from others to solve the problems.

Individual:

• Research

  • Since it’s my first time working on the unreal engine project, I have some concerns about how I was able to deliver what I was in charge of doing. Fortunately, by spending a good amount of time researching the unreal engine and specific features I was looking for, I managed to figure out all of the elements that I needed to work on.

• Resource

  • Despite all the research, there is still some of the work that I couldn’t figure out completely. By asking for help from one of the producers in my capstone track who is a very talented unreal engine game designer, I managed to solve the problem in the early stage of the development process.

What Went Wrong:

Team:

• Lack of chain of command

  • In the early stage of the development process, there is a problem of nobody being able to step up and call the shot. This led to multiple problems such as Nikhil overwriting others’ work in the first week, Ganesh breaking the build by not properly implementing the blueprint, and Tyler not contributing at all during the development process. I recognize all these problems can be solved by having a producer or lead overseeing and establishing proper development practices.

• Lack of communication

  • Same as the problem of lack of chain of command, due to nobody is calling the shots, the communication between teams were bare minimal, it is very challenging to know everybody's progress during the development process. This leads to the team having multiple merge conflicts and causing time wasted trying to fix the problem.

• Lack of developer

  • Although the project was designed for five people to complete, only Georgios and I were constantly working on the project..

Individual:

• Merge Conflict

  • Due to a lack of group project experience, I had a hard time figuring out how to work on GitHub. There are serval occasions that I caused merge conflict because I wasn’t aware of somebody has pushed their work to GitHub. Luckily I was able to fix the problem but this still causes me some time to fix the problem.

Reflections:

• Better communication:

  • One of the main problems the team had is communication, there are serval incidents of merge conflicts due to a lack of communication within the team. For future reference, it will be ideal to establish a better communication pipeline beforehand so that each member of the team will know what is going on.

• Better research:

  • The research regarding the project during the first week provided a lot of help to the development process. It is most definitely essential to for the development team to spend their time fully researching the specific topic to plan out the project ahead of time so that there will be no confusion occur down the development process.

• Assign role properly:

  • Another problem during the project will be the capability of each member, some of the members were not knowledgeable enough to take on a certain task which lead to delays and bugs happening in the project. For better result in the future, it will be better for the team to assign specific role and task based on the skill each member have to avoid the fact that the task is too challenging for the individual to complete.