Georgi Tsaklev
Programmer struggling with artThe Cake is a Lie - Dev Log Eight
GDD730 Dev Logs
Published on July 26, 2021
In Week 8 the team raised some long-hidden concerns.
Being part of the team
Early this week, our UX designer Mary raised some major concerns she had. She felt left out and felt that the team was taking from her responsibilities. We had a long conversation where I tried my best to clear out any miscommunication around the topic and reduce the heat of the conversation. I am not going to write everything, but I am going to summarise the most important learnings from the situation and my thoughts on it.
First of all, the root cause of this has been the lack of communication and alignment between the team members. We've been going over the plan we are following weekly and no concerns on the work distribution have been raised so far. This means that there have been assumptions or unshared questions lurking in the back of some member's heads. This is definitely not a good practice and all concerns in a project should be shared as quickly as possible to mitigate problems early or completely avoid them.
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Additionally, the expectation of what is UX designer's job is a game development project should have been validated through research on the topic. While I strongly believe in that, I am not blaming Mary at all as it has been very difficult for all members of the team to work on the prototype, do research, cover weekly course topics and write dev logs while maintaining their work-life balance. The time we have to cover everything is definitely not enough and we all have to prioritise very carefully our time. A lot of times life just gets in the way and waits for no one.
Lastly, I want to reflect on the way this concern was raised. As I mentioned earlier, almost from the start of the discussion it became heated. It was difficult to do work and participate in the conversation to try to calm it down. The psychological safety of the team is invaluable for the ability of the people to work together as a team (Edmondson, 2018) and our's was definitely negatively impacted. Raising concerns in a calm constructive manner is essential for their quick resolution while maintaining the team's psychological safety (Edmondson, 2018). Hopefully, next week we will be able to build it back up.
Features and improvements
This week I worked on some small improvements. Firstly, the player's hands were too glossy, so I toned down the material and played with the colours to make them better fit with the environment. Additionally, I've split the tag we use for objects that can be picked up their material changed. What we had before is that every item that can be picked up can also have its material changed. This was a false assumption now that we have our first full level as there are parts of it that shouldn't be carryable but their material should be changed. Thankfully, our system was created well so it wasn't a big problem to implement the change.
The big feature I worked on this week was the ability to change the environment as the game progresses. The system includes some material auto-detection logic that enables us to place assets without worrying about what should and what shouldn't get changed. I've also included a new Skybox system (Occa Software, 2021) which allows us to change the sky very easily at runtime. In the end, we end up with this amazing effect that really strengthens the idea of the degrading world.
Teaser
Since the mock pitches, I keep thinking about our feedback. One piece of it was that we should show more about the game and intrigue the listener more at the start. A perfect way to do this is by including a short teaser at the start of the pitch and I had the perfect idea for that!
I've started by creating an environment in a brand new scene since our levels aren't ready yet. I knew I wanted to focus on the Tree of Life and the logo James created, so I started by adding the basic blocks such as buildings and the tree, followed by scripting the camera movement together with changing the environment as it goes along. I was really excited throughout my work on the teaser as this is the first time I've ever made anything like this.
The next step was to make the environment interesting by adding "clutter" both inside and outside of the building where the camera will see. Finally, I've added music (Ivers, 2021) and sound effects (Girardot, 2019) as well as our logo around the tree. With this ready, I've recorded the result and added the final "Coming Soon" screen.
I am extremely happy with the outcome as I've learned a lot by doing this teaser and it would be an amazing intro to our pitch.
References
Edmondson, A.C., 2018. The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. John Wiley & Sons.
Girardot, O., 2019. Free Sound Effects Pack. [online] Unity Asset Store. Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/audio/sound-fx/free-sound-effects-pack-155776 [Accessed 26 July 2021].
Ivers, S., 2021. Underglow | Royalty Free Analogue Atmospheric Music. [online] Silverman Sound Studios. Available at: https://www.silvermansound.com/free-music/underglow [Accessed 26 July 2021].
Occa Software, 2021. Skies (+ Volumetric Clouds) (URP). [online] Unity Asset Store. Available at: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/particles-effects/skies-volumetric-clouds-urp-189943 [Accessed 26 July 2021].
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