Batteries Included was for me a powerful learning experience. I don't say that lightly. When you pour a lot of time into something, it becomes a part of you. As a result, there is a profound sense of personal development that accompanies incremental updates to the project. You commit more and more time, and the pool of progress grows.
I'm going to look at how my commitment to the project changed over time, not just in terms of raw numbers but also as a recounting of what influenced my capacity to be committed: factors such as excitement, team dynamics, and simultaneous other class work or events that influenced my personal liquidity.
Pour moi, I was thrilled to join a VR game development team. I had just completed my moon landing into the virtual reality space, having launched a solo experience on Steam. One Giant Leap was my step forward into working on VR, particularly on locomotions; a foundation I was eager to work from to speed up development on this new project.
This prototyping stage was the golden age of our development timeline. Development was like riding down rapids on an innertube. Within a day, we had a basic environment akin to The Lab's Longbow demo established, with VR player and movement working. Without need for polish or over-arching design, we were able to churn out ideas and see what stuck. We soon had a playable demo with combat, towers, a shrinking interaction, various interactable doodads, and rudimentary AI. A virtual reality tower defense was taking shape: you had the real-time strategy of placing towers to defend your castle from incoming enemies, and the personal action of firing the bow of the archery tower by shrinking yourself down to toy-scale.
The goal from here was to get to a point where we could pump out content, to fill our pool with enough water for players to splash around in. More towers, more enemy units, more VR-original player abilities. Little did we know... we wouldn't get to a point of simple content production. We would be reworking systems for the rest of the timeline. Nevertheless, here is a video snapshot of this point in time:
Have you ever played a game of "Telephone"? In that game, you are passing a phrase or sentence down a line of people by whispering it into each other's ears in turn. By the time the muttering reaches the end, its announcement is usually starkly different from what was originally sent down the line. This exemplifies the loss of information in communication. This factor is multiplied by the number of individuals.
Now imagine that same Telephone scenario, but with a game design instead of a mere phrase. For each person added to the team, the difficulty of communication becomes further strained.
This was especially complicated by a different approach to daily standups. Before, in our group of four, we were doing daily standup meetings in class. But at the same time that new team members joined, multiple groups in the class (including ours) transitioned to a new "online standups" approach using an Excel sheet to fill out every morning before meeting.
I found that this reduced accountability and closed lines of communication we otherwise shared in-person.
Combined with the new independent variables that were each new team member, communication bandwidth was at an all-time low.
Accordingly, I lost my flow.
Here you can see my contributions graph for Imaginarium:
Design at this time became both strained and more strict. There was an uncertainty about who was designing the game due to the influx of new members, as well as a class-level objective change about the need to continue prototyping versus solidifying a design. Programmers were told not to present designs of their own; thus ending the prototyping phase and damming the supply of excitement that was the Blue Ocean. For a VR game, where prototyping is paramount at all stages in the process, this simply did not work.
Roles also were re-assigned. Whereas before, I was Lead Programmer based on my intimate experience with the VR Player functionality and the setup of the scene, I shifted gears from also handling task-management to simply focusing on VR interactions, while Jeremiah Stevens picked up the reins to handle tasks. This made the most sense for our situation, since he did not own a VR headset, so this allowed him to manage tasks for programmers and do non-VR-specific programming in his time.
This particular shift, unlike the rest, proved to be quite effective for our project. However, it still impacted my commitment in this context.
By the end of this phase, the sum effect was that my commitment liquidity was drastically reduced, as I allotted more priority toward other school work and personal projects and so became less available to work on Imaginarium.
I'm going to look at how my commitment to the project changed over time, not just in terms of raw numbers but also as a recounting of what influenced my capacity to be committed: factors such as excitement, team dynamics, and simultaneous other class work or events that influenced my personal liquidity.
Part 1: Towerscape
Back in November of 2017, I joined Devin Good, Alex Bowling, and Julian Povinelli to create a VR game for the Game Workshop classes. This game, Towerscape, would be the first VR game for the program at Indiana University. We had a blue ocean of possibilities ahead of us. Like sponges, we could absorb the possibilities through prototyping, pooling ideas that worked. The open frontier of virtual reality remains tantalizing today – we still think of new concepts we want to prototype. This excitement is a key driving factor to my commitment to the project.Pour moi, I was thrilled to join a VR game development team. I had just completed my moon landing into the virtual reality space, having launched a solo experience on Steam. One Giant Leap was my step forward into working on VR, particularly on locomotions; a foundation I was eager to work from to speed up development on this new project.
This prototyping stage was the golden age of our development timeline. Development was like riding down rapids on an innertube. Within a day, we had a basic environment akin to The Lab's Longbow demo established, with VR player and movement working. Without need for polish or over-arching design, we were able to churn out ideas and see what stuck. We soon had a playable demo with combat, towers, a shrinking interaction, various interactable doodads, and rudimentary AI. A virtual reality tower defense was taking shape: you had the real-time strategy of placing towers to defend your castle from incoming enemies, and the personal action of firing the bow of the archery tower by shrinking yourself down to toy-scale.
The goal from here was to get to a point where we could pump out content, to fill our pool with enough water for players to splash around in. More towers, more enemy units, more VR-original player abilities. Little did we know... we wouldn't get to a point of simple content production. We would be reworking systems for the rest of the timeline. Nevertheless, here is a video snapshot of this point in time:
If we measure my commitment toward the project via the GitHub Contributors commits graph, I opened up very strong. My liquidity – availability to commit time toward the project – was very high. This project was at the top of my agenda.
(Note the dip in March when I attended GDC.)
The Towerscape phase ends here; soon the name of the game changed.
Part 2: Imaginarium
After making it through the Shark Tank, the floodgates opened up for new team members to join. This caused quite a stir in the previously calm waters. I find this visual to be a good metaphor:Have you ever played a game of "Telephone"? In that game, you are passing a phrase or sentence down a line of people by whispering it into each other's ears in turn. By the time the muttering reaches the end, its announcement is usually starkly different from what was originally sent down the line. This exemplifies the loss of information in communication. This factor is multiplied by the number of individuals.
Now imagine that same Telephone scenario, but with a game design instead of a mere phrase. For each person added to the team, the difficulty of communication becomes further strained.
This was especially complicated by a different approach to daily standups. Before, in our group of four, we were doing daily standup meetings in class. But at the same time that new team members joined, multiple groups in the class (including ours) transitioned to a new "online standups" approach using an Excel sheet to fill out every morning before meeting.
I found that this reduced accountability and closed lines of communication we otherwise shared in-person.
Combined with the new independent variables that were each new team member, communication bandwidth was at an all-time low.
Accordingly, I lost my flow.
Here you can see my contributions graph for Imaginarium:
Notably, Imaginarium was about the same duration as the previous stage of the project (6 months). However, only 83 commits were made, indicating a less frequent project contribution.
Design at this time became both strained and more strict. There was an uncertainty about who was designing the game due to the influx of new members, as well as a class-level objective change about the need to continue prototyping versus solidifying a design. Programmers were told not to present designs of their own; thus ending the prototyping phase and damming the supply of excitement that was the Blue Ocean. For a VR game, where prototyping is paramount at all stages in the process, this simply did not work.
Roles also were re-assigned. Whereas before, I was Lead Programmer based on my intimate experience with the VR Player functionality and the setup of the scene, I shifted gears from also handling task-management to simply focusing on VR interactions, while Jeremiah Stevens picked up the reins to handle tasks. This made the most sense for our situation, since he did not own a VR headset, so this allowed him to manage tasks for programmers and do non-VR-specific programming in his time.
This particular shift, unlike the rest, proved to be quite effective for our project. However, it still impacted my commitment in this context.
By the end of this phase, the sum effect was that my commitment liquidity was drastically reduced, as I allotted more priority toward other school work and personal projects and so became less available to work on Imaginarium.
Part 3: Batteries Included
Soon enough along the course of this story, we arrive at the waterfall. The moment of completion, of publication, of release. Let me open up with the latest contributions snapshot:
(Note that this last time period is only over 3 months.)
Here we can see that I have stepped down to the 2nd contributor position, in favor of spending more time on other projects (especially the Moon Motion Toolkit). Granted, all my work on locomotions, while expanded externally, came right back to this project as a plugin-level upgrade. But nevertheless, my objective commitment in this stage of the project does not compare to the initial volume of time poured in.
However, there is a catch, and a positive one! We started having weekly workshop sessions at the end of each sprint: get-togethers where we work in the same space as a full-blown games studio would. Each session has made tremendous progress; the amount of work done in a week is matched in one day. The initial project excitement surrounding prototyping is made up for by the team spirit, collaboration, and the shared desire to create a compelling product. So the side of the story that isn't shown in this final graph would be all of those commits I contributed when peer-programming using a shared user account, in-workshop. This means that in reality, the final stage contains much more commitment from myself than is readily visible in the graph.
As we wrap up our final sprints to polish the game for release, we are all very happy to have learned the best approach. The greatest reward of this project has been the team-based working experience. A team project is best worked on as a full team, rather than in split work groups.
Tonight we toasted to this success. Cheers!
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