Mami's Post Mortem - Mami Update

Wow.  What a year.  Mami has been through a lot these past few months.  It has seen people come and go, lore written and dismissed, art created and discarded, mechanics programmed and removed, and countless other iterations come across the project life-time.  There are some things Mami still needs, but there are so many more things that the game has accomplished.

Starting the academic year, there were a lot of decisions to be made.  What mechanics could be applied to the game?  How detailed is the story?  Levels?  Engine?  Art-sound-etc etc etc?  Some of the most important insights into what would later evolve the title came about in September, October, and November.

However, scope is the five letter word of the industry as far as I’ve experienced.  Thus, the time not spent on the programming and implementation backbone of Mami was too great when compared to what the industry uses now as a production process.  Those assets, though, do bolster an impressive library of material that clearly defines the world Team Squaybies created, and the assets are always there for future reference or use.

Referring back to implementation, that brings me to my next topic: skills that are needed in a game development team, and the life-span of those skills.  Throughout the year, we at Team Squaybies - an assemblage of technically nine individuals to six by year’s end - had a various assortment of skills to bring to the project.

What was desperately needed was more programmers.  The chief coder was a beast at AS3, but he’d been working with the language for a year previously in a professional setting; Team Squaybies’s project manager knew a little bit, but otherwise was regulated to very front-end manipulation; I myself know plenty of code, and picked-up the language of Adobe Flash quickly, but I was still not on-par with the primary programmer, mainly slowing down his progress if I tackled a problem alone.  Coding was important from start to very finish, and having more coders with a previous familiarity of the tool of choice is not a make-or-break situation for game development, but it sure darn well makes things more efficient!

Now, what about the art direction?  To start, we lost our audio skill at the turn of the calendar year, though he did do excellent work prior to his leaving.  Would more work have been required of him the second semester?  I can’t say.  I also can’t say if it was overly detrimental to the outcome of Mami, but it just shows that the pool of audio talent that the game projects groups have access to is quite slim.

Moving the art focus forward to what is more traditionally considered art, the visual concepting phase of the project was by far too long.  Some persons were doing over an hour to turn out one half-finished piece of concept – when put into the context of working being done in only two-hour working blocks three to four times a week, that is ridiculous.  I have good faith that anyone in a design studio would happen to agree.

Now, try combining the visual arts, level design, narrative brainstorming, and other miscellaneous fields outside of the implementation track (e.g. programming).  These fields far outweigh the number of people capable of bringing about a game, and within the game projects course here, last on the employ of a team for the entire year.  I may be horribly biased, but a great number of non-implementation individuals are needed at the start of game development; halfway through the development cycle, I could only see maybe one, two, or at most three persons of strong artistic intent.  Everyone else should have multiple skills, transferable between development teams!

Well, I’ve ranted enough.  Team Squaybies really pulled a good project together this year in the form of Mami.  The team was fairly solid.  It was a great time, I learned a lot, and will be taking the best of my new knowledge to help create a game I designed for next year.  But now, here’s to creating great gaming experiences, and taking care while doing it!  

Stay tuned for a possible update to my Mami adventures, where I go into the details of what I learned, what I did horribly, and what I believe to be good work on my part.  See you then.

P.S.  Please comment on my thoughts of the past year, the issues raised, your own experiences in teamwork and project development, or ask any questions you may have.  If I missed anything, let me know!