Anthony Ma
gameplay Animator
Anthony Ma
Anthony Ma
Anthony Ma
The Redwoods
Summary
The Redwoods is a Fairy tail RPG game I was the main producer for in my Games Production 1 class. In the game you play as Red as she adventures throughout her story helping other fairy tales to become un-corrupted from the dark wolf spirit. Making choices throughout the game, Red makes friends or enemies and discovers the truth behind the Redwood. The game's art style is a mixture of 2D RPG elements set in a 3D interact-able environment.
Responsibilities
- Lead team meetings and oversaw task delegation
- Organized weekly sprints on Azure Dev-Ops,
- Acted as the team Scrum Master
- Kept track of file management and version control
- Developed, monitored and established a functional asset pipeline
Game Info.
- Team Size: 8 (3 artists, 2 game designers, 2 programmers, 1 producer)
- Development Time: 9 weeks
- Engine: Unreal Engine 4
- Administration Tools: G Suite, Trello, Azure Dev-Ops, GroupMe
Post-mortem
Over the course of the project I was able to create an asset pipeline with my team to get assets into our game in a timely and stylistically similar manner. To the right is a diagram that shows how we would develop our assets. The system has built in checks and redundancies to make sure that the assets works, and has built in time to do asset polishing. I also have the process set up to get input from each of the teams (Art, Design, and Programming) at least once. I wanted each facet of the team to have a say on different parts of the game,so that everyone could voice their opinion during the creative process.
Below are some of the takeaways I learned over the nine week production cycle
What went right
- Starting early allowed us to solidify our game's goal well ahead of time and gave us a chance to prototype
- Scope was lowered early in preproduction in order to achieve attainable results
- Able to successfully take assets through each step of the pipeline and get them working in game
- High team morale created a supportive atmosphere to push our individual limits
- End product went above what we set out to achieve
What went Wrong
- Technology troubles, especially when it came to properly exporting, created delays in the production pipeline
- Team members were sometimes lost on which specific tasks they were responsible for
- Mismatch in skill level within team created unrealistic expectations
- Working on different versions of the engine due to several legacy systems created extra work down the line
- It took more time than we set aside to merge assets together.
What we Learned
- The early start we had over other teams allowed us to solidify our game's goal well ahead of time and gave us a chance to do some prototyping
- For future iterations, running prototype assets through the production pipeline to resolve all possible technical issues is a must
- Maintaining positive attitude and a healthy team atmosphere allowed for a willingness to keep reiterating on past work