Of Progress, Rewards, and Spooky Things

Today I'm going to talk a little bit more about teams. For all that content is super important (I mean, it's literally what makes up the game), in my experience with development most of the conversation focuses on content creation, so throughout development of Project Kassa, I'll be making periodic blog posts about other aspects that are important as well but seem to get a bit less emphasis. You'll be able to find all these posts under the "Producer" tag if you'd like to read more of them.

Last time I wrote one of these, it was about the assembly of a team, today we're going to talk a little bit about a lot of things, ultimately boiling down to morale. Keeping team morale high is important for team health, sanity, and quality of work. A team with low morale won't work as hard, or as well, as a team that is happy with themselves, each other, and the project.

One of the most important things to keeping morale high is a sense of accomplishment. People who have achieved something, or feel like they have, generally feel better about themselves and whatever it is they're working on. One of the easiest ways to do this is to track progress. Now there are a ton of ways to do this, and what is going to work for one team won't necessarily work for another, and sometimes what works for one team might only work for a specific project, so I'm going to stick with talking about what we're doing for this project rather than going too into the many options available.

We initially tried using VersionOne, which is a lovely site that I highly recommend trying if you are a fan of scrum and are looking for a reasonably priced option for it, the staff was communicative and the I found the interface very easy to learn and use. Unfortunately, it went under utilized, it didn't mesh well with the team. What we wound up with, and has been working so far for us, is a simple whiteboard.

Current Whiteboard

Different team members have different colored post-its, and we have three columns "To-Do," "In Progress," and "Completed." Only tasks from the current milestone (which - for us - is monthly), or outstanding from past milestones, are on the whiteboard. Each team member is responsible for moving their tasks to the appropriate column as they progress, and at the end of the milestone we take all the "Completed" post-its and stick them here:

Our progress spindle!

We bought a receipt spindle from an office supply store. There's something satisfying about impaling completed tasks on a pointy object. You may notice that our particular progress spindle has several marks on it, when we got it we decided to break it up into inches and whenever we complete enough tasks to reach an inch, we go on a morale adventure.

Morale adventures are fun, we've already done one in the form of visiting Fort Stevens in Oregon and Cape Disappointment in Washington, which gave us the additional benefit of a TON of photo/video/sound reference for our game as well as an opportunity to get out as a team and do something.

For our first inch, which we are rapidly approaching, we're discussing going to the ghost town Monte Cristo in Washington, where Danny and Branden will get us killed by following horror movie tropes instead of being sensible about the whole thing. The other options include the haunted soda machine in Seattle, or doing the Pike Street ghost tours. Obviously we lean towards spooky rewards, given the focus of our game and our apparent disinterest in not getting murdered by ghosts.

And once again, this post is turning out long, so I'm going to end it here, and talk a little bit more about smaller-scale morale boosting events in a later post.

Line Quality

Today's post will be on line quality. One of the key pieces to the art style for Shove Aside is the thick, graphic lines. As we are going for a gritty comic style, it helps breathe life into the world. In the poster, we wanted as much variety as we could get to differentiate the different materials in the world. The texture of dry patchy grass is different from a thick leather jacket or tree bark. Each part is simulated with different splotches and strokes to best evoke the feeling of that material as well as provide some artistic flair. In the examples above, you can see the different types of line quality used for the base of a tree, Dani's hair, patches of grass, tree bark, Dani's jacket, bushes, and Gabe's pants. Stay tuned for more updates!

State of the Environment 5

Here are some quick screenshots from Unity to show you our environment so far Our second color pass is looking successful as we altered all of our original textures and used a cooler and bluer pallet to create our new textures. We still have interior assets and lighting, soon to come.

Color for the color god.

We've been spending a lot of time thinking about color and shadow recently. Getting the right color to make the environments feel like the northwest is key, so we're using a lot of cold greens and blues. Here are some color comps of our environment.

Rough Dani Push

Rough animation of Dani beginning to push something.