Introduction
Round 4 was a story sound. The objective of round 4 was making an interactive story game in 3 weeks. Our team made virtual reality guitar hero controller action game with the story that a hero saving the dystopian world with the power of music.
What went right?
1.Simple Story
In the pre-production phase, our team made tons of stories that explains everything. However, we consult our story with the narrative expert Chris Klug and he recommends us to make the story as simple as possible and we figured out it was much more helpful to deliver the story to the people who plays our game. It’s because the interactive story is about being someone else and experience something, not listening and watching something. We found that different syntax has to be used for the interactive story.
We tried to keep the story as simple as possible and it helped players to immersed to our experience.
2.Strong capacity team
All of the teammates had a really strong capacity. Artists had awesome 3d modeling and UI development skill. Programmers had amazing programming skills. Sound designer(myself) made an incredible song for the game. Everybody did their job and it helped us making the awesome game experience in two weeks.
3.Unique but intuitive VR Controller
We believed not many VR develop tried using guitar hero controller for the VR application. We mixed our story and controller really well, and it made our game intuitive and novel at the same time.
What went wrong?
1.Dictating leadership
I was kind of dictator of the team. I kept saying “No” to my teammates even though I said it in a polite way and it demoralized some of my teammates. I even headbutted with one of the programmers because I believed quality is more important than the what teammates thought at that point. However, I learned the dictatorship can be effective only in the pre-production phase because nobody was listening to the producer who lost their teammates’ trust.
I apologized to all my misbehavior to my teammates and confessed my sin. The apology had accepted, and then I could manage the team.
2.Personal incident
Some teammates struggled with the personal incident and that affects our productivity at the last development phase, but it didn’t affect the quality of the game that much. After I experienced this problem, I started to consider personal schedule when I estimate the schedule.
3.No game designer
There was no initiative game designer in the team. I tried hard pitching lots of game design idea to the team, but every game mechanic has to be discussed, so we spend much time deciding game mechanics rather than spend time on actual development. We should’ve chosen one teammate as designated game designer and distribute the work to the person.
Conclusion
We made an amazing story game with a novel controller,(and with awesome music). I learned the project can be failed if someone tries to dictate the team, even all of the teammates have an unbelievable capacity. Now I believe team dynamics is a very important factor of success of the project. I’m not the smartest one in the world. I have to always respect all the teammates and that makes all the teammates engage to the project.
Team members: Joshua Hanjoon Kim(Producer/Sound designer), Yang Zhou(Programmer), Sarvesh Subramanian(Programmer), Carrie Yang(Artist/UI/UX designer), YiHeung Zhu(Artist/3D modeler)
JOSHUA HANJOON KIM 