Plushies was the final project of my studies in Rubika. It's a 20 minutes experience that is meant to guide you through its experience. It's a nice relaxing walk in the sunny fields while beating the life out of the patchies !
-Cute Stuffed animals
-Simple Brawling Action
-Colorful Environment
Team Leading
Game Design
5th year of studies (2020-2021), Rubika, Valenciennes, France.
In Rubika, the first four years are spent learning as much as possible on every subject to get ready for the final test :
The long awaited year-long experience to create a complete project with 10 other students.
14 complete months of autonomy and regular evaluations to prove that my team and I were up to the task.
First, the school asked every game designer to send a small 5 page document to pitch their game idea to a jury. Artists and programmers could join in as well leading to almost 50 distinct projects being sent for evaluation. I didn't send any this year. "Why ?" you may ask ? Well I thought that I already had my shot, my own project (MARBL, you can read about it here) got covered during my fourth year of studies, production went wrong but I was proud to be able to create enjoyable concepts and I thought to myself : "This time I'll help a project I believe in, everyone should get their chance to have their project showcased, I don't need it twice."
The project I tried to help didn't get picked in the end. It needed VR equipment and sadly the beginning Covid pandemic left us unsure to be able to access our school's VR lab. So teachers chose to discard the project and pick something else instead. Out of the 8 remaining projects, I had to choose between multiplayer experiences, abstract game design concepts or... Plushies, the shy game about stuffed animals fighting each other in a cartoon fashion. The project was led by an artist that didn't have any designers volunteering to help. I felt that if I didn't offer my help, the project may have gone wrong and I couldn't stand the idea of letting down this wholesome project ! So I made my choice. It would be Plushies !
Plushies' Original Prototype, you played a crocodile with AI friends
Along with 3 other artists, 3 game designers and 2 other game programmers I joined the project to bring it to the world ! Together we spent the first few months on setting the objectives for the following production and shaping what would become our game. I fired up Unreal Engine 4, and the white boards started to get filled with post-it notes. Sadly, soon enough, problems started to emerge.
Our team began splitting up as communication problems became apparent, our objectives were set too high in regards of our teams production capabilities and it led to trust issues between the members of the project. Were we all giving it our best ? Our leader at the time was certain that it wasn't the case, and so because I was one of the lucky few who had her trust, I slowly became a messenger between the two halves of the group. One of them was convinced our project was going to fail because of the team not putting in enough work, and the other half thought that we were failing because of our dying communication and our high expectations.
In the beginning of January we had to showcase the project's current state. We had a small piece of everything we wanted, an enjoyable character to play as, swarms of enemies, the beginning of a small open-world experience, working crafting elements, AI teammates following you around and interactions between them, it was a hard task but everything was there and functional ! And just as we predicted, the jury didn't like it. It was way too rough to meet its ambition by the time the year would be over. The group was finally heard by the leading members, but the blow was too violent for them. They wanted to throw in the towel and call it a day. I stepped in during a meeting and said "I'll lead this project if you'll allow me to." I gave up a lot of things for this project. A shot to get my own project featured, being part of a project I knew was an assured success. I took a risk and I was about to take another. But I just wouldn't accept giving up.
Quickly we re-assigned the roles, I became "Creative Director" (a very sexy title, but I would concede that it's not very meaningful in a student project) to direct us towards what I felt was the right aim for the project. I got paired with a new Producer, one of our artists volunteered to manage our meetings and deadlines. Finally the Art Director role got passed onto the artist that had the clearest vision for our cute setting. Our two former leaders asked if they could be given the tasks that would involve them the least in conception and creation work so we asked them to work on 3D assets, lighting and finding and integrating animations.
As a form of first measure, I kicked off the new team by listening to everyone's concerns and ideas to make sure that we wouldn't repeat our past mistake. I decided to put my trust on the team and believed that our problems will quickly be solved, we started testing the project together once a week to find problems and fix them quickly so we could iterate faster between reviews. Things were starting to look a bit brighter but sadly we couldn't catch up with the time lost in the beginning fast enough.
The Overstuff, one of the feature added to "save the game".
In the middle of March I had to tighten the screw to push through our creation, I had to remove freedom in the group to focus on the objective, a cute beat'em up game. During my studies I became a very potent Game Designer, and I wasn't limitating myself to my programmer role, so over a week-end I streamlined the game experience and during our next meeting I presented the idea to the team, wanting their approval to follow this guideline.
The core idea was to remove huge roadblocks from the project, removing the open-world approach in favor of a more linear experience, removing the AI squad to replace them with alternate control of the characters (like in Sonic Heroes) and to use some features as a quick polish method to add gamefeel to the game given our limited time. Mechanics like the wads and the Overstuff to have an ultimate capacity, a repeatable rhythmic change in the experience. And finally I added a boss as a moderate challenge to use this mechanic in a more spectacular ending.
The proposition wasn't very original, nor was it very exciting, but it was what our project needed to be enjoyable on the day the jury would test it. to achieve this result I used a thought process I created that I called the "FACE Method" (called the ABCD method in french). Basically, every new feature added to the game has to be :
-FUN. It has to bring some joy or at least trigger an emotional reaction for the player.
-ACHIEVABLE by your team to iterate quickly on it
-CONNECTED to the other elements of the game
-EXPLAINED to the player thoroughly and simply.
The FACE method, visualized
Using this method, you make sure that everything is done for a purpose (Fun, the player's enjoyment). You also take into consideration your strengths and weaknesses (Achievable, your team's capability). You consider the big picture and create a complex system made of simple elements (Connected, the game's mechanical layout) and last but not least you make sure that your player will be able to understand it so that they can play with it and experience the things you created for them (Explained, the feature's accessibility).
Now our road ahead was clear, we wanted to "survive" no longer inspired for greatness but for the "good enough" to aim for what would maximize fun and minimize risk. I wasn't too proud of it but if everyone on the group got their efforts rewarded through our diploma it would have been worth the trouble. The teachers recognized my efforts as my individual evaluations got high grades but I was too tied to the team's condition to be glad about it. I felt physical repercussions on the amount of stress I was dealing with, I lost some sleep, lost some weight, and I started looking more and more like a zombie. Furthermore our group grew divided once more as our previous leaders were getting angry that their initial objectives weren't going to be met and assumed no responsibility for it. So dragging their feet I lacked leverage to make them change their mind. In a student project you can't fire team members for misconduct or have any sort of agreement regarding paid work. I tried talking but we wouldn't come to an agreement, so we decided to focus on the result, we both wanted success so we had at least this in common.
The final jury testing our games, the final test of our studies
In the end, you know what being a leader is about ? It's about reliability. It's about trust and it's about shielding your team from minor troubles that can eat their focus up. As deadlines grew closer and closer, I could spend less and less time on my own programming work, so I had to delegate my work to my colleagues and follow their progress. One of the skills I was glad to use was being able to understand everyone's work. I got this one from my curiosity about all gaming subjects and I put it to good use to ensure our creative vision's objective was coming along on track and on time. I spent most of my days ensuring a crystal clear communication and troubleshooting our most tenacious problems. Namely I came to school early or stayed late to ensure our build schedule, our lighting system's cluster render system and critical problems that would block my team's work. I worked on the documents our teachers and jury members requested to make sure the team was focused on the project and I would say that it was very much worth the risk. I discovered through this that I valued human interaction and organization much more than just tackling mindless tasks. I got to be helpful through other skills than just being creative and though this period was very challenging I felt very proud of my team's work and took some credit from it.
In the last few days, the project took form, and after 30 minutes of presentation summing up 14 months of challenges, troubles, fights and scarce bliss, we could finally show it to our jury members. We got told many things, that it was too simple, that compared to other games it lacked ambition, and I knew every bit of critic was justified. But most of them told us "your teachers told us how your development unfolded, taking this into account, your result is impressive. Congratulations on keeping your motivation up and delivering it on time and on par with the expected quality. You outdid yourselves !"
At this moment, I wasn't feeling like they were sugar-coating it. I felt like I deserved it. We deserved it.
To this day I'm still grateful of my team's dedication. I couldn't have turned it around without them. In the beginning I wanted to put my technical skills to good use, so I did it. And even though I didn't want to take the lead, I'm glad I took the leap without thinking too much about it when the project needed it. When I look back at it my only regret was that I didn't did so sooner. We could have avoided more problems and even maybe come out on top with less friction and broken wings. I learned through this project that I had to trust myself more. And from this point onward I would always stand up in those kind of situations, the video game medium is the art form I chose to express myself and expressing myself I shall.
"Don't wait before it's too late to use your skills. When your group is divided, remember that you all strive for success.
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