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Where have I found success while prototyping?
We've just finished up sprint five of our production cycle. Until now, we've been making prototypes and experimenting with ideas until we find something that sticks. For the first three weeks, we made three prototypes. These few weeks were pretty hectic as it is pretty difficult to get an idea across in just one week. I've done game jams before under tight time constraints, but for the purposes of this course, one week is equal to six hours. Making a game or a prototype in just six hours is very difficult, and I ended up spending about 12 hours per week on these projects.Where have I found success while prototyping?
City building and pathfinding in Crustacean Nations.
With that said, I believe that sprint three was our most successful week so far. During this time frame, we developed the prototype for Crustacean Nations, a crab-focused RTS game. We ended up picking this game to move forward with. In just one week, we managed to implement selectable troops, navigation and movement, basic combat, a building system, and win/loss states. This is a lot to do in one week, and the team worked together quite well to see this through. I believe this prototype was successful because each feature is a small building block that builds off of the other mechanics. This results in gameplay that is much more fun than we initially imagined, and data from testing would agree.
Don't spend 12 hours a week on these projects. This is the most important thing I've learned from the rapid prototyping phase. Doubling the expected contribution while taking several other classes was too much to take on, and I'll certainly be scaling down my workload in the future. I've noticed that I am particularly prone to burnout, so being mindful of this will be beneficial moving forward. On that note, keeping the project organized and spending time working on architecture will be helpful so that everything will run smoothly into later stages of development.
What did I learn from this?
Don't spend 12 hours a week on these projects. This is the most important thing I've learned from the rapid prototyping phase. Doubling the expected contribution while taking several other classes was too much to take on, and I'll certainly be scaling down my workload in the future. I've noticed that I am particularly prone to burnout, so being mindful of this will be beneficial moving forward. On that note, keeping the project organized and spending time working on architecture will be helpful so that everything will run smoothly into later stages of development.What did I learn from this?
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